Part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness guide.
Repeaters are one of the best parts of this hobby. Stick a repeater on a tower or a mountain and suddenly two handhelds that couldn’t hear each other across town can talk clearly across a whole metro area. Under normal conditions, this is exactly what GMRS and VHF/UHF repeaters are built for, and they work really well. If you’ve never used one, find a local repeater, learn the repeater etiquette, get the tone right, and enjoy how far a little 5 watt handheld can reach.
The Catch: Repeaters Need Infrastructure
A repeater is a piece of infrastructure. It needs power, it usually sits on a tower or building you don’t control, and in a lot of cases it depends on a phone line, internet link, or commercial power to stay on the air. Under blue sky conditions, none of that matters. In an actual grid-down event, all of it matters, which is the same problem I dig into in why GMRS alone won’t save you when SHTF. The repeater you’ve leaned on for years might be silent right when your community needs it most, whether from a dead battery bank, a downed tower, or just being out of range of the disaster area entirely. An EMP is the extreme version of this same vulnerability, and grid-tied repeater infrastructure is exactly what fails first when one goes off.
Don’t Wait Until You Need It to Find Out
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does take planning and practice before anything goes wrong. Figure out now what happens to your local communications if every repeater in range goes dark tonight. Can you still reach your family? Your neighbors? The rest of your community’s net?
Simplex Frequencies and Relay Stations
The most direct fallback is simplex, radio to radio, no repeater involved. Pick a small set of known simplex frequencies ahead of time and actually test them with the people you’d need to reach. If distance is a problem, set up relay stations, people positioned between two points who manually pass traffic along, the same idea as a bucket brigade. This only works if you’ve practiced it, so build it into your regular radio checks instead of treating it as a someday plan.
Higher Power and Better Antennas Change the Math
A lot of the range gap between needing a repeater and not comes down to power and antenna, not the band. A 5 watt handheld with a rubber duck antenna is convenient, but even a simple HT antenna upgrade helps, and a mobile unit running 25 to 50 watts into a proper antenna will punch through terrain and distance that would stop an HT cold. If a relay station is going to matter, put a mobile rig and a real antenna there, not just another handheld.
Cross-Band Repeat: Turn Your Jeep Into a Mountain-Top Relay
Some dual-band mobile radios can do something an HT can’t: cross-band repeat. You listen on one band, say 2 meters, and the radio automatically retransmits what it hears on another band, like 70 centimeters, at the same time. Two radios that couldn’t otherwise talk to each other end up bridged through that one mobile unit, sitting in the middle acting like a miniature repeater. I have the AnyTone AT-D578UV III Plus and used to have the Icom IC-2730A, and both have this built in, it’s one of the most underused features on either radio.
Here’s the scenario that makes it click. Park the Jeep on a mountain or ridge between two groups whose handhelds can’t hear each other because the terrain is in the way. Set the mobile radio to cross-band repeat, listening on the frequency one side is using and repeating out on the frequency the other side is using. Each group just talks to the Jeep on their own band like they would any repeater, and the Jeep bridges the two sides automatically. No tower, no club repeater, no infrastructure you don’t control, just a vehicle parked in the right spot.
This is what makes it such an easy option for a grid-down or field scenario. You’re using gear you already own for its normal job, just aimed a different way: the Jeep’s battery and alternator for power, a 50 watt mobile unit instead of a 5 watt HT, and an antenna actually mounted for range instead of a rubber duck. Drive to high ground, key up the cross-band repeat function, and you’ve got a functioning relay in minutes with no permits, no coordination with a repeater trustee, and nothing to build.
Yagis: Punching Through When You Need Directionality
For a dedicated point to point link, like a fixed relay station aimed at your neighborhood or a family member’s house, a yagi antenna is worth having on hand. Its directional gain can turn a marginal simplex path into a reliable one, especially over the kind of distance that would otherwise need a repeater to bridge.
HF and NVIS: Covering the Whole State, No Repeater Required
VHF/UHF and GMRS are great for local range, but they’re line of sight, so terrain and distance both work against you. HF changes the equation entirely. With an NVIS antenna, a low horizontal dipole or similar setup, you can bounce signal almost straight up into the ionosphere and cover an entire state reliably, hills, mountains, and all. Terrain that would kill a VHF simplex link barely matters to NVIS. If your community is spread out across a wide area, this is how you keep everyone connected without depending on any repeater at all.
Change the same antenna’s configuration from NVIS to something like a sloper, and you shift from state wide coverage to real DX. That gives you a way to reach out across the country or across the globe to pull in information from far outside your immediate area, weather, news, other regions’ conditions, whatever is relevant, and relay what you learn back to your local community over HF, UHF, VHF, or GMRS. One HF station with a couple of antenna configurations can function as both your regional backbone and your window into the wider world.
The way to prove this works before you need it is to run a net on it. I walk through that in What Is an HF NVIS Regional Net?, including the modes, the net software, and four station builds at different budgets. And for how I layer VHF/UHF simplex and HF NVIS together once every repeater is dark, see Your Repeater Is Not a Plan.
Build and Test Your PACE Plan
None of this is useful if it only exists in your head. Work it into a real PACE communications plan with primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency options, and test all of them with your family or community, not just the primary one.
This is part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness guide, where we cover the gear and planning that keeps your community connected when the easy option isn’t there.