Once you’ve accepted that a communications plan is a document and a set of trained habits, not a pile of gear, the next question is what actually goes into it. These are the components that show up in every serious plan, whether it’s a family, a neighborhood group, or a served-agency EmComm team.
PACE: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency
PACE is a military planning framework that’s become standard in serious EmComm circles because it forces you to think through failure in advance rather than during it. For each communications need, you define four options, ranked:
- Primary: Your first choice, normally the easiest or most convenient, like a cell call or a text
- Alternate: A different method that doesn’t depend on the same infrastructure, like a GMRS or ham radio simplex channel
- Contingency: A backup that assumes both of the above have failed, such as a ham radio check-in schedule on a specific band
- Emergency: The last resort, often something slow but nearly infrastructure-proof, like a physical rally point or a written note left at a known location
The value of PACE isn’t the acronym, it’s that it forces redundancy across genuinely different failure modes instead of four flavors of the same single point of failure. A cell call and a text message both die with the same cell tower. A GMRS radio and a ham radio don’t fail for the same reasons.
Rally points
Every plan needs a physical fallback for when radio contact fails entirely. A rally point is a predetermined location where people know to go, and often a predetermined time or condition for going there, if communications break down completely. This is the same idea contained in the 3-3-3 Radio Plan’s design philosophy, which I cover in The 3-3-3 Radio Plan, communications and physical meetup planning are two halves of the same problem.
Defined roles
Someone needs to be responsible for net control if your group runs scheduled check-ins, someone needs to own the frequency and channel list, and someone needs to be responsible for keeping backup gear charged and functional. In a served-agency context this maps to formal roles under ARES or RACES, but even an informal family or neighborhood plan benefits from simply assigning who does what, rather than assuming it’ll sort itself out.
A common frequency and channel list
Everyone in the plan needs access to the same list: which GMRS channels, which ham simplex frequencies, which repeaters (with the understanding they may not survive an extended outage), and in what order to try them. This list is exactly what belongs in the written document I cover in Documenting Your SHTF Communications Plan.
A message format
Ad hoc conversation is fine for casual traffic, but important messages, especially anything involving status, location, or requests for help, benefit from a consistent structure. This is where formal traffic handling comes in, and I cover the actual format used in served EmComm networks in ICS-213 and Message Formats. You don’t need to run a formal net to benefit from a consistent, simple message structure.
Putting it together
A complete plan combines all of these: a PACE-structured set of communication methods, a rally point for total failure, defined roles so responsibility doesn’t default to whoever happens to be around, a shared frequency list, and a consistent way to structure important messages. None of these pieces are complicated on their own. What makes a plan real is having all of them written down and actually practiced, which I cover in Training Your Family or Group on the Communications Plan.
For the bigger picture, see my Emergency Communications and Preparedness pillar page.