Community Emergency Net
Radio Protocols

Note: this is the second in a series of articles. You may wish to read the first article before proceeding here. However, your choice!

Protocol I: Equipment and Service for Local Communications

From the first article, you will know that I recommend GMRS for local communications. For those who do not wish to pay the license fee, register with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) or who want or need the cheapest options, FRS is an option and is able to talk to GMRS on channels 1-14.

FRS and GMRS are “services” (frequency allocations, equipment and communications mode specifications, and rules pertaining to use) controlled by the FCC.

To buy equipment, you can check into it on Amazon.com or at just about any good sized sporting goods store, radio store, or places like Best Buy. Just ask for “FRS radios” or, you got it, “GMRS radios.”

Your community may choose a different service (and therefore different equipment). Ideally, if everyone in your community is on board with Amateur Radio, you would choose this service and the related equipment. This gear is less easy to find locally, but there are, thankfully, large sales organizations that you find in metropolitan centers and on the internet.

Whatever service and equipment you specify, it pays to indicate in your protocol where equipment is available for purchase.

Protocol II: Call Channel Designation

Once you’ve settled on what service and equipment your community will use, you need to specify a channel or frequency and mode you will use as your place on radio to congregate.

During a drill or an emergency, people come to this channel, listen, check in, state their condition and whether they are available to help others. Then they are advised whether to listen for a while, or check in again in a specified time, or whatever might seem prudent.

If you use GMRS, I recommend choosing any of channels 1-7. This allows full power for GMRS licensees, but the ability of FRS users to participate in both training drills and actual emergency operations. You want a big tent, as they say, when it comes to emergency communications.

With GMRS and FRS, there is something called privacy modes. These aren’t really private, but they make it so that you don’t hear what someone else is doing on the same channel with a different privacy mode. The FCC does not allow for radio users to obscure the meaning of their communications, so just remember: privacy modes don’t give you any real privacy at all.

More importantly, I recommend that on your call channel, you just shut off privacy modes. This has two practical points.

First, with privacy modes off, you hear everything that is going on on the channel. Yup, even the stuff supposedly coded for privacy. This keeps the call channel honest, so to speak, forcing order.

Second, with that order enforced, emergency personnel, whom you have hopefully informed about your call channel, can listen in on a scanner. You DO want this. With order on the channel, they can respond directly to the most urgent need.

Protocol III: Call Channel Clear Channel Restriction

Establishes clear channel restriction for the call channel in the event of a disaster or emergency. This means that no one uses the channel, unless they are: 1., called on the channel; 2., Are expected to check in; 3., Need to call for help; or 4., are offering help.

Logically following from the comments above on call channel selection, it makes sense to require the call channel to be clear of other conversations than official network traffic. The idea is that if you want to chat with someone, take it to a different channel altogether.

This precludes the use of “privacy modes” on the call channel frequency.

There is no way to legally enforce this, as the FCC does not grant a specific frequency to anyone in any of the services that are practical for use in community emergency communications. So, a community will not be allowed, by the FCC or anyone, to establish a law making your community’s call channel clear.

However, the FCC does have a very strong rule that emergency traffic (defined as radio traffic pertaining to conditions of life and death or major property destruction) has priority, period. This IS enforceable.

Beyond that, all there is to get people to cooperate is an appeal to their good sense and human decency, a diplomatic (if firm) request, or peer pressure. You can’t expect backup from the FCC or law enforcement if you try to enforce it. In fact, you’d probably get yourself locked up for it.

Protocol IV: Community Security

The foregoing brings up another point. Here you are in an emergency. You just radioed your name and vulnerability to the community. While bad guys rarely would participate in an emergency radio net, they might be listening in by scanner or otherwise.

It therefore makes some sense to encode your identities. This is an area where each community should sort out for itself how to do this, and keep that information more or less unpublished. It should be a simple thing, though, that people can figure out—not just some number designator assigned to users. This means no one is ever without a coded location and people in the know can always decode the location

For example, there may be a streetname/number combo you can use for identification purposes. Net participant Joe Smith calls in, lives at 12345 9th St. His code might be “three-four-five niner.” This would be to combine the last three digits of his address with his street name. Anyone in the know can figure it out, but it would be a problem for the typical bad guy. This is just one example; every community is different, and your community will have to work one out that works for it.

IMPORTANT: If you will be using such codes, you need to provide them to law enforcement. As noted earlier, the FCC disallows any codes that are intended to obscure the meaning of a message. They’re concerned about insurrections and illegal activities, so you want the law savvy to your codes; otherwise, you become a bad guy—a community of bad guys, even “criminal conspirators”—for no reason.

Protocol V, Right of Way, Call Management and Etiquette on the Call Channel

Emergency Traffic: per FCC rules (and good sense), emergency radio traffic is always first priority and always has right of way over everything else. Remember, emergency traffic ONLY pertains to danger to life and major property. If you wouldn’t call 911 with it, don’t imagine that it is an emergency worthy of giving you priority over someone’s real emergency.

Where there are multiple emergency calls, the network manager (whoever has taken charge of taking check-ins, etc.) must figure out how to triage the calls. This is a tough situation, and the network manager will need your support, even if you feel that your emergency is worse than the other guy’s. Just make sure that when you report it, you are clear on the danger to you, so that a good determination can be made.

Amateur Radio has been doing this for a long time. We do well to learn from it. In Amateur emergency nets, there are three other levels of message beyond emergency: priority traffic (net administration), Health & Welfare (“I may not be there, honey, but I’m ok. At Joe’s.”), and Routine (just chatter). Once emergency traffic is done, then administrative (verifications, etc.), then Health and Welfare, then just whatever.

You can imagine that getting this all down will take practice. Yes it will. And a measure of dedication. This is why it wasn’t advocated to go out and buy all the radio you can (whether you are licensed for it or not), and keep it in mothballs until an emergency.

The network manager is essentially whoever on the network is able to do it. If five callers are in emergency status, and one is doing ok, guess who is elected! A community will do well to cultivate several trained net managers, but they might all be the ones incapacitated. Thus, everyone who anticipates participating in the emergency net needs to prepare mentally to handle it, and it is preferable if they drill for it.

Another aspect of this protocol is the specific handling of messages, how to take them so that they arrive accurate. Once again, Ham Radio has been doing it for years. Called radiograms, this will be handled in another article.

PROTOCOL VI, Communications outside the community

In a cataclysmic emergency, first responders may not be able to act, or may be so tied up elsewhere that your community is more or less ignored. This may be necessary, per their own protocols, but it may be that they don’t know that you need help.

Further, in a few disasters I’ve seen and experienced, news of conditions is often delayed. If you can speed up the response of other responders, whether other cities, other counties, the state or the Feds, you have served a fine purpose. If you can notify a busy emergency transport department of a need for an airlift, you may save a neighbor’s life, that of a friend, family member or just someone.

What this requires is a way to communicate outside your area. Really, the only viable option is Ham Radio. In my community, since we discussed this, there are three new Hams. Another is studying to take the test. I’ve spoken to three others who express that it could be a possibility. Hey, I did it; it obviously doesn’t require a rocket scientist’s brain!

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