The Power-Outage Communication Kit: Hear the Warning, Then Talk

Outage kits are assembled around light and information: a flashlight, a crank radio, maybe a power bank. Both of those are receiving. Not one of them answers the question people actually have at hour six, which is where is everyone and are they all right.

That gap is the whole point of this page. The fix is cheap, it is legal without any paperwork if you buy the right service, and it takes about ten minutes to set up properly. Everything below is cited to the FCC, the rule text or the National Weather Service.

The gap in every outage kit

A NOAA weather radio is receive-only. So is a crank radio, a shortwave set and a scanner. They are superb at telling you a warning has been issued (NWS: NOAA Weather Radio) and completely unable to tell your family where you are.

Cell networks usually survive the first hours of an outage on tower batteries and then degrade — and well before they fail, they congest, which is why texts get through when calls do not. A pair of handheld radios bypasses the network entirely for the distances that actually matter in an outage: house to street, house to neighbor, car to house, one end of a property to the other.

The kit list

1. A S.A.M.E. weather radio for the house, programmed to your county, with alkaline backup. This is the part that wakes you.
2. A portable radio with its own power — crank, solar or alkaline — for AM/FM news once the power is out and for the go-bag.
3. Two-way radios, one per person or one per location. FRS or GMRS; see the next section.
4. Spare batteries in the sizes your kit actually uses, checked twice a year.
5. A power bank for phones, because the radio's battery is for the radio.
6. A written channel plan taped inside the lid of the box. The piece everyone skips.
7. A paper contact list, because the numbers live in a phone that may be dead.

FRS or GMRS: the one decision that has a legal answer

FRS is licensed by rule. Anyone may use an FRS radio, at any age, with no application and no fee (FCC: Family Radio Service). If the radios will be handed to neighbors, friends or a volunteer group, FRS is the correct and only clean answer.

GMRS needs one individual FCC license, which covers the holder and their immediate family — spouse, children, parents, grandparents, siblings and in-laws (47 CFR 95.1705). No exam, ten years, and in return you get more power, removable antennas and repeater access (FCC: GMRS). For a household kit it is usually worth it; for a neighborhood kit it is the wrong tool, because the license does not stretch to the neighbors.

Either way the radio must be certified for the service it is used on (47 CFR 95.1761) — a programmable ham handheld is not an FRS radio. The full decision is in GMRS vs FRS and do you need a GMRS license?

What to buy

The one-page channel plan

This is the cheapest part of the kit and the one that makes it work. Write it down, tape it inside the lid, and give a copy to everyone who holds a radio:

• Primary channel and code. Pick one and write it down. Not the factory default, which is what every other radio in the neighborhood is also on.
• A backup channel, in case the primary is busy.
• Check-in times. Radios eat batteries when they are on all day. "On the hour for five minutes" keeps everyone synchronized and the batteries alive.
• Who calls whom, and in what order. The same list as your family communication plan.
• The out-of-area contact everyone texts when they get a bar of signal.

Privacy codes are worth one line of explanation on the plan: they are a squelch filter, not encryption, and anyone on the channel with codes off hears everything — see what privacy codes really do.

Batteries and charging, in the order they fail

1. Standardize on one cell size if you can. A kit where the radios, the weather radio and the flashlight all take AA is a kit with one spare pack to manage.
2. Keep alkalines for storage, rechargeables for use. Lithium packs self-discharge in a closet; alkaline cells do not.
3. Check twice a year, on the same day you do smoke alarms.
4. Keep the phone power bank separate from the radio. The crank radio's pack is small, and charging a phone from it is a partial charge at best.
5. Pick radios with an alkaline fallback where you can. A rechargeable-only radio has exactly one life per outage — see walkie-talkie battery life.

The limits to plan around

Handheld radios do not reach as far as the box claims, and an outage does not change the terrain. Plan on the maker's own terrain figures rather than the headline mileage — how far walkie-talkies really reach has the table. Inside a house with steel and concrete, expect less again: radios in concrete buildings explains why.

GMRS repeaters can extend things a long way, but only if one exists near you and its owner permits use, and a repeater on grid power may not survive the outage you are planning for (GMRS repeaters). Plan the kit around simplex — radio to radio — and treat anything else as a bonus. If you want the broader argument, do walkie-talkies work if the grid goes down? is the page.