Why ham radio still matters: the hobby, what it does for you, your family, and your town, and a century of times it kept people alive when everything else failed.
Part of our Clubs and Nets guide. CERT and ARES get confused for each other constantly, and while they are separate programs with different scopes, they overlap enough that many hams find real value in doing both. What CERT Actually Is Community Emergency Response Team training is a FEMA-backed program that teaches civilians basic disaster…
How to build a PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) radio communications plan combining GMRS, ham radio, and non-radio backups.
A practical roadmap to EmComm capability, covering ARES and RACES, message formats, digital tools like Winlink, and what actually holds up when it matters.
Passing a message accurately over a radio net is a specific skill with its own format, and ICS-213 is the standard form most served agencies actually expect. Here is how real message traffic gets handled.
Nearly every EmComm post on this blog assumes a general familiarity with how volunteer emergency communications are organized. ARES and RACES are the two structures actually behind most of it, and they are not the same thing.