Why HF Radio Matters Most When the Grid Goes Down

Part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness guide.

Picture the first night of a bad one. The power is out, the cell towers went quiet when their backup batteries did, and the internet is just a spinning icon. You are bugging in, which is usually the right call. The problem is you have no idea how big this thing is. Is it your town? Your county? Half the country? When is the power coming back, and is anyone even working on it?

Your neighbors do not know either. Your local repeater net, if the repeater is still up, is a room full of people who all know the same small slice of the story. Everyone inside the affected area is blind in the same way. The people who actually know what is going on are outside it, watching the news, and HF is the only radio in my shack that can reach them with no tower, no internet, and no infrastructure in between. Just a radio, a battery, and a wire.

Why HF Is Different

VHF and UHF are line of sight. Handhelds, mobiles, GMRS, and repeaters are excellent across a neighborhood or a town, and they are what my family and team carry. But past the horizon they need something in the middle: a repeater on a hill, a linked system, an internet gateway. In a wide-area event, those are exactly the things that fail. I made that case in detail in Your Repeater Is Not a Plan.

HF uses the ionosphere as its repeater. Nobody has to keep it fueled, nobody has to drive up a mountain to fix it, and it does not care whether the grid is up. Depending on the band, the time of day, and the antenna, the same radio can reach the next county or the other side of the planet. I think of HF as doing two jobs: NVIS for my region and DX for everything beyond it.

My main station lives in the shack: a Yaesu FTX-1 Optima and an Icom IC-7300 Mark II, set up side by side so I can monitor more than one band or frequency at the same time. That matters here, because I can sit on a regional NVIS net on 40 meters with one radio while the other watches 20 meters for stations outside the event. The FTX-1 Optima also covers VHF/UHF, so it is the bridge between what I learn on HF and the handhelds my family carries. When I need to leave the shack, a second FTX-1 rides in a go-box, and the Jeep has a Yaesu FT-891.

NVIS: Your Region, No Skip Zone

Near Vertical Incidence Skywave means sending the signal almost straight up so the ionosphere drops it back down in a circle around you, roughly 300 miles in every direction with no skip zone. It works on the lower bands: 40 meters during the day, 80 meters at night, and 60 meters for the hours in between. The antenna is a horizontal wire mounted low, somewhere around 10 to 30 feet off the ground. I cover the details in What Is an HF NVIS Regional Net?

In a SHTF situation, NVIS answers the regional questions:

• How far does the damage go? Is the town 80 miles away powered, or dark like you?
• What is open? Roads, fuel, and stores within driving distance.
• Where is help? Shelters, distribution points, or an EOC operating nearby.
• How is your group? Status checks with your team, your club, or your ARES district.

From my station in Maricopa, a 300 mile circle covers nearly all of Arizona. If Phoenix and Tucson are both dark but Flagstaff and Yuma are fine, I already know a lot about the shape of the event, and I learned it without a single piece of infrastructure.

HF DX: Borrowing Eyes Outside the Footprint

NVIS tells you about your region. But if your whole region is in the dark, everyone you reach on NVIS may be as blind as you are. That is where DX comes in. Go up in frequency, get the antenna higher, and the signal leaves at a low angle and skips hundreds or thousands of miles in a single hop. (The antenna side of that trade is in NVIS vs. Vertical DX Antennas.) Now you are talking to someone whose lights are on, whose phone works, and who can read you the news.

I think of it as polling in rings:

• Neighboring states (roughly 500 to 1,500 miles): 40 meters at night, 20 meters during the day. These stations can tell you how far the outage spreads and whether it reached them.
• Across the country: 20 and 17 meters in daylight. A station on the other coast can tell you how the national news is covering it, what the federal response looks like, and whether this is one event or several.
• Other countries and continents: 20, 17, and 15 meters, plus 10 meters when it opens. With Solar Cycle 25 past its peak, the high bands open less often than they did in 2024 and 2025, so 20 meters is the workhorse. If the event is big enough to lead the news in Europe or Japan, that alone tells you something about its scale.

How I Would Poll Other Regions, Step by Step

1. Listen before you transmit. Receiving costs almost nothing in battery, and a lot of the picture is already on the air. Run WSJT-X on 20 or 40 meters for a few minutes. FT8 decodes without internet, and the decodes show you which regions are reaching you right now. If you are seeing the East Coast and Europe, you know where to point your questions.
2. Check the time and broadcast stations. WWV on 5, 10, and 15 MHz gives a space weather update at 18 minutes past each hour, which tells you how HF should behave. Then sweep the shortwave broadcast bands for whoever is still on the air. International shortwave has shrunk a lot, so keep a printed schedule in your kit. You will not be looking it up online.
3. Find the nets already working the problem. During hurricanes the Hurricane Watch Net runs on 14.325 MHz by day and 7.268 MHz at night, and the Maritime Mobile Service Net is on 14.300 MHz. In a big event, nets like these, plus ARES and traffic nets, carry real information about affected areas. Listen and log. Do not jump in unless you have traffic they need. More nets to know are in Cool HF Nets Worth Checking Into.
4. Ask a specific question. When you find a station clearly outside the event, tell them where you are and what you need: “This is KZ7K in Maricopa, Arizona. We have no power, phone, or internet here. Can you tell me what the news is reporting about the outage in the Southwest?” Then work through the follow-ups below.
5. Ask more than one region. One station is a data point. Three stations in three different places who all heard the same thing is information.
6. Go digital when voice will not make it. JS8Call decodes well below the noise at low power and can relay messages through other stations. Winlink over HF can reach a gateway outside the affected area and send and receive real email, including messages to family and replies from people who can look things up for you.
7. Write it down. Time, frequency, call sign, location, and what they said. Rumors move fast after a disaster, and a log lets you sort what is confirmed from what is secondhand.

What to Ask For

• Scope: which states, cities, or regions are affected, and roughly how many people.
• Cause: storm, grid failure, cyber attack, or something else. The cause tells you a lot about how long it will last.
• Restoration: what utilities and carriers are saying about timelines for power, cell, and internet, if they are saying anything at all.
• Response: whether FEMA, the National Guard, or state agencies are deployed, and where shelters, water, and fuel are being handed out.
• Outside help: whether utility crews, mutual aid, or relief convoys are on the way, and roughly when they are expected.
• Roads and supplies: which highways and bridges are closed, and where fuel, water, and groceries are still available.
• Comms nearby: whether cell and internet work in neighboring areas, and which repeaters and nets are still active.
• What is coming next: weather, follow-on storms, or advisories for your area.

Print it: I turned this list into a one-page poll sheet with room to log the contact and write down each answer. Download the HF Outside-Info Poll Sheet (PDF). Print one per contact and keep a stack in your go-box.

Then bring it home. Whatever you learn on HF, pass it to your family and your local VHF/UHF or GMRS net. One HF station can be the news source for a whole neighborhood.

CommStat: Your Group’s Status Board on HF

Polling the outside world is half the job. The other half is keeping track of your own people. That is where CommStat comes in. It is a companion app for JS8Call that turns ordinary JS8Call traffic into a status board for your group, and it is the tool I want running in the shack the moment the grid goes down.

• Status reports by grid: each station sends a short status report tagged with its grid square, and CommStat lays them out so you can see at a glance who is fine and who needs help.
• Live traffic: JS8Call traffic scrolls by in real time, so you see what is going on as stations report in.
• Maps of stations reporting in: reports are plotted by grid square, which shows you where the trouble is and how far it reaches.
• Group messaging: one message reaches your whole group instead of going out station by station.

CommStat does not need the internet. It rides on JS8Call over the radio, so all it needs is your HF rig and a computer to run it on: a PC, a tablet, or a Raspberry Pi. That computer is part of your power budget, so plan for it. The catch is that nobody learns a new app in the middle of an emergency. CommStat is something you use and practice during normal times, on regular nets, so the screens and report formats are second nature when it counts. I cover how it fits alongside VarAC and FLDIGI on a regional net in What Is an HF NVIS Regional Net?

The Rules Still Apply

You need a General class license or higher for most of what is in this post. A Technician can listen anywhere and has some 10 meter voice privileges, but 40, 20, and 17 meter voice belong to General and up. Get the license now, because nobody is running exam sessions in a grid-down event. Start with Getting Licensed. Asking for news is ordinary amateur operating, and normal Part 97 rules apply. Part 97 does make room for emergency communication when life or property is in immediate danger and normal systems are unavailable, but that is for real emergencies, not a pass to ignore the rules because the internet is down. And if a net is handling emergency traffic, stay off its frequency.

Practice It Before You Need It

Try this on a weekend. Disconnect from the internet and give yourself two hours with nothing but the HF radio. See how much you can learn about the world from the shack. Which regions could you hear? What news did you pick up? Who answered? Next time a hurricane threatens the Gulf, listen to the Hurricane Watch Net from wherever you are and notice how much information moves through it. This is a skill like any other, and the time to build it is while the internet still works to check your answers.

NVIS keeps you connected to your region. DX tells you how big the problem is and what is being done about it. Together they turn a dark house into a station that knows what is happening, and that is why HF is a core layer of my PACE communications plan.

If you want proof this works, I collected a century of real cases, from 9/11 to Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, and Helene, in Why Ham Radio Matters: A Hobby, a Lifeline, and a Century of Proof.