Besides Two-Way Radios and Protocols...

Listening Tools

A community emergency radio network will benefit from having a scanner on board. A scanner, for those who don’t know, is a radio receiver that scans many frequencies. It can be programmed to scan many individual frequencies, or up and down bands of frequencies. When a message is received, it stops at that frequency and you hear what’s going on.

One use of a scanner is to listen to other radio services, like CB or business radio frequencies, in case some member of the community has some other gear that isn’t compatible with your community emergency radio network gear.

It can be used to scan Ham bands or commercial shortwave, for news and other information.

You can also use it to scan police, aircraft and fire bands, to see what they are up to. Police and fire may encode their messages, so you can’t hear what they don’t want going to the public. So, you may or may not get much info from these.

All in all, while I wouldn’t call a scanner a primary piece of gear, it is good to have one on hand.

Other Necessities

It’s awfully easy to think of the electrical grid as always there. It may or may not be, during an emergency. So, any radio gear you have, you should have extra batteries and perhaps alternate power for it, such as solar panels with battery backup.

Most GMRS and CB handheld units use AA or AAA batteries. I recommend having quite a supply of these on hand at all times, and rotating them, as they have a shelf life. Some gear works better with alkaline batteries, and some works better with nickel-metal hydride rechargeables. So, it makes good sense and is a good aspect of emergency preparedness to know this about each piece of gear, and have a good supply of each type on hand for each.

With rechargeables, I’ve found that they have a rather short shelf life. That is, they lose their charge just sitting over days or sometimes weeks. So, if you have them, rotate them through a charger every few days, or keep them on a trickle charger. This is the only way to assure that they’ll be good when you need them.

For bigger gear, it pays to have one or more deep cycle storage batteries on hand. These are often used for electric boat motors, and are usually 12 volt units. From these batteries, you can operate 120v gear (that normally would plug into a wall outlet) for a pretty good length of time before they run out of juice. This requires an inverter of sufficient output capability for the gear you will want to plug in. You should work out beforehand how much that will be.

Again, it pays to have some solar or wind power generation capability, to use to recharge whatever rechargeable (nickel-metal hydrid, deep cycle, or nickel cadmium) batteries. One hopes that the emergency will pass before you need that step (that is, before you can no longer run a car to charge a deep cycle batter or run your radio gear), but hopes and realities are often out of step with one another.

This backup power can’t be emphasized enough. Think about Hurricane Katrina, and how long people were without grid power then. That was an extraordinary event compared to many, but it certainly wasn’t the worst that nature (or technology’s potential failures) has in store.

I’m sure I’ll add other gear to this list as I think of it. But for now, that is what I have on the tip of my brain.

Contact Me

Back to Top