Communication doesn’t stop at the edge of your property, and it shouldn’t stop at the edge of your group either. Knowing what’s happening two counties over — or two states over — is part of the same skill as being able to talk to the person standing next to you when the phones stop working. Both come down to the same thing: having a real plan, not just a radio in a drawer.
You Don’t Need 20+ People to Need a Plan
It’s easy to assume a “communications plan” is something only a large, organized group needs. It isn’t. A family of four benefits from exactly the same thinking a 20-person team does — just at a smaller scale. If your plan is “we’ll figure it out,” you don’t have a plan. If it’s four people who each know what to do, in order, without waiting for someone to tell them — that’s a real one, even if it’s just for your household.
Getting your family involved matters just as much as getting your friends or teammates involved, and it’s the same underlying issue either way: a plan only works if the people who need it actually know it and can execute it. A comms plan that lives in one person’s head isn’t a plan, it’s a single point of failure. Every additional person who’s briefed in, practiced, and confident with the plan is redundancy you didn’t have before — whether that’s your spouse and kids or nineteen other members of a team. Getting people involved isn’t a nice-to-add extra step; it’s the part that makes the plan actually hold up when the one person who normally runs it isn’t available.
What a PACE Plan Actually Is
PACE stands for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency. It’s a military concept that’s aged well into civilian and prepper use because the logic is simple: don’t rely on one method of communication, rely on an ordered list of them.
- Primary — your everyday method. For most of us, that’s still a phone call or a text.
- Alternate — the backup you reach for when Primary is down or unreliable.
- Contingency — what you fall back on if both Primary and Alternate have failed.
- Emergency — the last resort, the method you hope you never need but have anyway.
The goal is redundancy that’s actually redundant — each level should be a genuinely different system, not just the same system with a different app.
Start Simple — It Just Needs to Work
You don’t need a rack of radios and a call sign to start. You need something that works, today, with what you already have — and a plan to add to it as you’re able to.
That progression usually looks something like this: start with your phone — calls and texts. Add a simple radio, licensed or license-free, as your alternate. From there, look at APRS, which lets you send a text-style message over ham radio and have it wait in store-and-forward until the other person checks in — useful when you can’t count on both sides being on the air at the same moment. From there, something like Meshtastic gives you a local, encrypted mesh network for text messaging that doesn’t require a ham license at all, which makes it a great entry point for a family or small group. And MeshCore takes that same mesh concept further with smarter, repeater-based routing built for wider or more permanent coverage.
None of that has to happen at once. Most groups build it one piece at a time, as budget, training, and licensing allow.
A Living Plan, Not a Finished One
Your PACE plan today is not your PACE plan in a year, and it shouldn’t be. As people get licensed, as new gear gets approved or budgeted for, as you learn what actually works during practice, the plan updates. Treat it like a living document, not something you write once and file away.
New ideas should be tested, not just talked about. If someone wants to try a different radio, a different mode, a different app, or a different check-in schedule — try it and see how it actually performs before deciding it belongs in the plan. As a family, that’s easy: just try it. As a larger group, it’s worth forming a small committee to test the idea on a limited scale first. If it works, roll it out to the wider group. If it turns out to be too complicated, too expensive, or too unreliable, you’ll know that before you’ve committed everyone to it — and you can weigh the cost with real information instead of a guess.
Don’t Throw Out the Old System When You Add a New One
Every layer you add earns its place. None of them retire the layer before it.
This is the part that’s easy to get backwards. When something new shows up, the instinct is to replace whatever came before it. Resist that.
Simple VHF voice check-ins weren’t made obsolete when digital modes came along — they’re still faster to set up, easier to train new people on, and don’t require anyone to understand a data protocol under stress. Digital modes weren’t made obsolete when APRS caught on — they solve a different problem. APRS hasn’t been made obsolete by Meshtastic or MeshCore either — APRS still does something neither of those can: wide-area coverage over a decades-old, genuinely global network, with store-and-forward messaging that doesn’t need both people online at once.
That’s not clutter — that’s what makes a PACE plan actually resilient instead of just newer.
Learn From AmRRON — and From Everyone Else
We’ve referenced AmRRON before — the American Redoubt Radio Operators Network — and it’s worth saying plainly: they’re doing real, ongoing work across every one of these fronts, from basic voice nets to digital traffic to newer mesh options, and they run actual exercises to test it, like the T-REX event we participated in. Their videos are a genuinely good place to pick up practical ideas instead of guessing — check out amrron.com if you haven’t already.
But they aren’t the only source, and they shouldn’t be treated as the last word. Learn from as many sources as you can and bring new ideas back to the group. It’s easy for any team to get stuck relying on the same small circle of ham radio guys who are comfortable with what they already know and resistant to trying anything different — even when a better option exists. A good comms program stays curious. Read outside your usual circle, watch other groups’ approaches, and be willing to change your mind when something better comes along.
Practice Like You Mean It
A plan nobody’s practiced is a guess with extra steps. The more people you have relying on a plan, the more that plan needs practice — more people means more chances for someone to be unsure of the protocol at exactly the wrong moment.
Practice only works if you actually build it into what you’re already doing. We’ve worked it into our hikes, our monthly check-ins, our FTX events, and our participation in exercises like T-REX — anywhere there’s an opportunity to get on the radio and run the plan for real, we take it. Communications practice deserves the same priority we give to shooting or medical training, not a lesser one. It’s a perishable skill just like the others, and it fails silently — you don’t find out your plan doesn’t work until the moment you actually need it.
Run the Scenario in Your Head First
Before you’re relying on a system, stress-test it mentally. Pick a realistic scenario and walk through it as a family or as a group: a windstorm takes out the local cell towers for two days. A bad storm knocks out grid power for a week. Or, at the extreme end, an EMP takes out everything with a chip in it at once. For each one, ask honestly: what in our plan still works? What doesn’t? What would we actually do?
This costs nothing and takes twenty minutes, but it’s one of the most useful things you can do for your plan. It’s a mental exercise, not a drill you need equipment for, and it’s a good way to find the gaps in your PACE plan before a real event finds them for you. Do it as a family around the table, or as a group at a meeting — either way, it’s how you problem-solve your way to a better plan instead of finding out the hard way.
Where to Start This Week
Write down your actual PACE — four methods, in order, for your household or your team. Share it with everyone who needs it. Then pick one level and practice it this week. That’s the whole starting point, and it scales from a family of four to a full team without changing the logic at all.
- This post is for general information only, not professional or legal advice. Amateur radio use requires appropriate FCC licensing where applicable — know the rules that apply to the equipment and frequencies you’re using.
