Plan before the day

• Two meeting points: one near home, one outside your area. Everyone knows the route to each, on foot.
• One contact person outside your region whom everyone calls or writes to. Long-distance links often work when local ones fail.
• A paper list of addresses and numbers, and a paper map.
• Leave notes where you were and where you went, with the date and time.

Listening

• A battery or hand-crank AM/FM radio is the most reliable source of news. Keep spare batteries.
• Shortwave receivers carry broadcasts across continents.
• Learn which stations broadcast emergency information in your country.

Talking at short range

• Licence-free handheld radios (FRS/GMRS in the United States, PMR446 in Europe) work over a kilometre or two in town, further in open country. Agree a channel in advance.
• Amateur (ham) radio reaches across towns and continents and is the backbone of emergency communication. Transmitting needs a licence, which means passing an exam, and is worth doing now. Free study material is in the offline kit.
• Low-power mesh messengers using LoRa radio (for example the open-source Meshtastic project) send short text messages over several kilometres without a network. They need setting up in advance.

Signals

Three of anything (whistle blasts, flashes, shots) is the common distress signal. A mirror can be seen for many kilometres. Agree household signals for "come home" and "danger".

Information hygiene

In a crisis rumours spread faster than facts. Prefer information you can check, from more than one source, and share only what you know first-hand.