Although food, water and shelter are critical to survival, there’s one specific thing that has set our species apart from all the others on Earth— the very thing that makes us the top of the food chain. That is, our ability to communicate using language. Civilization, society, trade, development, all of these things are ultimately only possible because of our unique knack for complex communication.

When we are kicked and backed into a corner, when we are threatened by lack of food, water, or when we suffer the risk of being exposed to the elements because of a large crisis or natural disaster, communication should be one of your top priorities along with immediate survival. There’s a myriad of stories of humans surviving the impossible, just as there are tales of people perishing in zones of war or disaster, or in acts of nature such as landslides, cave-ins and blizzards. More often than not, the main thing that sets apart those who survived and those who perished was communication.

‍The practice of emergency communications contains an extremely wide array of subjects and use cases. The apocalypse does not need to come to pass for you to need to learn about these, either.

For example, during the chaos of the Columbine shooting in 1999, so many people tried to call for help and contact loved ones that the lines were completely flooded, disabling cell phone coverage within the district. The only way 911 dispatchers were able to actually learn about the situation were through radio transceivers owned by school officials, who happened to be trained in emergency communications.

You also have the more low-technical applications. In the 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Chile, 33 miners were trapped for 70 days within a collapsed mine. Seventeen days after the accident, a note was found taped to a rescue drill bit pulled back to the surface: "Estamos bien en el refugio los 33" ("We are well in the shelter, the 33 of us").

Even outside disasters, the authorities often have the authority and initiative to suspend cell phone and internet service. Some examples of this include: the Myanmar 2021 military coup, the Hong Kong 2019-2020 protests, the Russian 2022 anti-war protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Iranian 2019 fuel price protests, the George Floyd protests in 2020 in Portland, Oregon, the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests, the 2019-2020 Catalonian protests in Spain, the 2024 UK riots, and many, many more. These operations attacking communication services lasted days, weeks, and some stretched into months, leaving hundreds or thousands without access to any internet or cell phone service.

In these situations, very few options remain for the average person to hear about recent events. Isolation can mean missing orders on evacuation, updates on roads and hazards, or opportunities for aid and assistance. In a small town or isolated community, a single person with access to long-range communications can become the single, only link between important resources and their community. The information in this guide will be largely US-centric. If you reside outside of the US, you should research your local laws and customs regarding the contents of this document. Emergency radio frequencies and laws may vary, but the broad strokes largely remain the same.

This is not meant to be a complete technical manual about these technologies. You will not learn to repair a radio in this guide. It is however our intention for you to have learned, for example, how to contact somebody who can, even in an emergency or long-term collapse of infrastructure. While emergency comms training can be so specific depending on your situation that it would be impossible for us to write about it with much authority, this guide will serve as a rough guide to not be caught unprepared— or rather, disconnected, and what your options are if that does come to pass.

Preparedness is an incredibly deep and comprehensive topic, that involves developing contingencies for food, shelter, transportation, clothing, sanitation, entertainment and communication all based on a threat model. Depending on where you live and what your situation is, you may be looking at different hazards or problems, such as blizzards, disease outbreaks, radiation, earthquakes, wildfires, political violence, floods, government collapse, heat waves, cold snaps, hurricanes, typhoons, war and many, many more possibilities.

'Threat modeling' is the methodology through which somebody can estimate the possibility of bad outcomes that would disrupt the normal, ideal functioning of their daily life, and prepare contingencies to counteract it, and then apply further contingencies to what they already have.

This is something most of us do in our daily lives without realizing it. If you feel the natural pressure to have a spare tire in the trunk to have a solution to a blown tire, or if you've downloaded maps of your city in the case that you take the wrong bus and get lost, then you have already practiced preparedness before. You were capable of doing it before, and you are still capable now.