The PACE plan is the new hot topic these days and rightfully so. It applies to equipment or system that is strategically important to your operation or your survival.
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Comms being high up on both those lists. Cells phones die, or loose service and lets face it electronics for the most part are pretty delicate. One back up in my personal Comms plan is a @beartoothradio. It does have short comings as it still requires a cell phone to work and any one you want to talk to has to have one but if you work out a plan with your party beforehand its a great secure short range form of voice and text communication. It also allows you to save maps for offline use in the event you need some navigation aide as well.
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When you’re planning you should always be thinking about redundancy. Communications is no different. You want to have multiple options incase one is not working.
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Option one for most people is their cell phone. In most urban areas this is going to be fine. In more rural areas or over seas this may not be enough. Other options include Ham radio, Satellite phone, cheaper burners, app/tools like gotenna or @beartoothradio, smoke signal…..I probably wouldn’t recommend that last one but what ever works for you.
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One of your options should be off grid capable. This means no infrastructure required outside of what you or your groups controls. @beartoothradio @gotenna can fit into this category. Meshtastic might possibly be a better option but i have to look into it more and will be doing that here soon.
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Personally I carry a cell phone, and then for people in my group when I’m traveling we have beartooth as backup. I was visiting a colleague in Alaska a couple years ago and beartooth came in handy quite often when we were out side of the city.
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another option that I have used in the past is just carrying a spare cheap burner from a service provider that is different from my main cell phone. I carried it unactivated and with a minutes card so that it didn’t expire and if needed can activate it load the minutes and off we go.
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