Communications Preparedness
Listening. Scanners, shortwave, and knowing what you are hearing.
Half of communications is receiving, and it needs no license at all. This guide covers the four rungs of listening, from a weather radio on the nightstand to a scanner and a software radio, what the law allows, what encryption has changed, and how to turn what you hear into something the household can act on.
No license, no transmitter, no excuse
Receiving is the other half.
Most of the pages in this section are about talking. This one is about the thing that happens first and more often: listening. During a real event, a household spends a few minutes a day transmitting and many hours needing to know what is going on. What roads are closed. Whether the boil-water notice is real. Where the shelter opened. When the power company says the feeder will be back.
Every bit of that arrives by radio in some form, and none of it requires a license, a call sign, or a transmitter. It requires a receiver, a few minutes of setup done in advance, and a habit of writing things down. That makes listening the job for the household member who does not want a license, the teenager who wants a real task, and the grandparent who would rather not learn a new radio but is very good at paying attention.
There are four rungs. Most households need the first two. The third is a judgment call that depends on your county. The fourth is for the person who enjoys it.
Rung 1 · $25 to $60
NOAA Weather Radio, programmed
Official warnings for your county, around the clock, on a receiver that wakes you up. Every household.
Rung 2 · Free to $30
Two local broadcast stations, identified in advance
The AM or FM station that carries local emergency information, and a backup. Every household.
Rung 3 · $100 to $600
A scanner, if your county still talks in the clear
Fire, EMS, public works, and highway traffic as it happens. Worth it in some counties and useless in others; this page tells you how to find out which.
Rung 4 · $30 to $150
Shortwave and a software-defined radio
Regional and national context when everything local is down, plus a window into the whole radio spectrum for the curious.
Rung 1, done properly
NOAA Weather Radio, programmed for your county.
The emergency alerts guide explains why this receiver comes first. This is the ten-minute setup most people skip, and the reason a weather radio either works at 3 a.m. or sits silent.
1. Find your transmitter
The National Weather Service runs more than a thousand transmitters, each on one of seven frequencies: 162.400, 162.425, 162.450, 162.475, 162.500, 162.525, and 162.550 MHz.1 Radios label these as channels 1 through 7, but the numbering is a manufacturer's convention with no official meaning, so work from the frequency.2 The station search at weather.gov/nwr lists the transmitter, frequency, and coverage map for any address.3 Full-power transmitters reach about 40 miles over level terrain.4
2. Program your county's SAME code
SAME stands for Specific Area Message Encoding. Each county has a six-digit code, and a receiver with the code programmed sounds its alarm only for warnings that name your county, instead of every county the transmitter covers. The station search shows the code beside the coverage map. Enter it, and if you live near a county line, enter the neighboring county too.3 The NWS recommends checking that the transmitter you chose actually broadcasts your county's code, since coverage areas and alerting areas do not always match.3
3. Place it, power it, test it
Near a window on the side of the house facing the transmitter, antenna fully extended. If you are near the 40-mile edge or in hilly terrain, a small external antenna on the receiver's jack fixes weak reception for $15 to $25. Leave the receiver in alert-standby mode, plugged in with fresh backup batteries, and note the weekly test: most NWS offices transmit a required weekly test on Wednesdays between 11 a.m. and noon local time, weather permitting, which is the free check that your receiver still wakes up.5
Buying one
Look for SAME alerting, all seven frequencies, battery backup, and an external antenna jack. A basic desktop alert receiver runs $25 to $40; a portable emergency radio with AM/FM, a flashlight, USB charging, and a hand crank runs $40 to $70 and belongs in the kit as a second unit. The desktop receiver on the nightstand is the one that saves lives; the portable is the one that goes with you.
Rung 2, the one nobody prepares for
Two local stations, chosen in advance.
When the power goes out, the first thing most people do is turn on a car radio and spin the dial looking for someone talking about it. That search takes twenty minutes in a strange market and produces a lot of syndicated programming from three states away. Do the search now, in daylight, and write two frequencies on the plan card.
You want the AM or FM station your county's emergency managers actually use to reach the public. Every state has an Emergency Alert System plan that designates primary stations for each region; your county emergency management office can tell you which one is yours, and it is usually the news-talk AM station or the public radio FM outlet with a local newsroom.6 The second station is a backup on the other band. Program both into every radio in the house and the vehicles.
AM has a property that matters in a regional disaster: after sunset, AM signals travel hundreds of miles by reflecting off the upper atmosphere, so a battery radio in a blacked-out region can hear a 50,000-watt station in the nearest big city that is still on the air. FM does not do this. The weather radio and the portable emergency radio from the previous section both include AM, which is why a dedicated AM/FM receiver is optional; but the two frequencies on the card are not.
Rung 3, the judgment call
Scanners: what you can still hear, and what the law says.
A scanner is a receiver that steps through a list of frequencies and stops where someone is talking. Twenty years ago, one in the kitchen let a household hear its own fire department dispatch. Whether that is still true depends on your county, and the way to find out costs nothing.
The law, in two sentences
Federal law makes it legal to receive radio transmissions from governmental, law enforcement, civil defense, and public safety systems, including police and fire, when they are readily accessible to the general public, and it does the same for amateur, CB, GMRS, marine, and aviation transmissions.7 The same statute makes it a federal crime to intercept communications that are scrambled or encrypted, and attempting to defeat encryption is itself the offense.7 Listening to an open channel is your right; the encrypted channel next to it is off limits, and no consumer scanner can decode it anyway.
Two cautions. A handful of states restrict scanners in vehicles, and several add penalties for having one while committing a crime; look up your state before mounting a scanner in the car. And receiving a transmission is not the same as republishing it: streaming a feed or posting what you heard is governed by different and murkier rules, and it is not something a household monitor needs to do.
What encryption has changed
Public safety radio has moved from analog to digital, from single frequencies to trunked systems that hop among a pool of channels, and increasingly to encryption. The RadioReference database, the volunteer-maintained catalog of who transmits where, listed about 226,000 frequencies and 328,000 trunked talkgroups in September 2026, of which roughly 44,000 talkgroups were marked encrypted.8 The pattern within those numbers is consistent across the country: police dispatch and operations channels are the most likely to be encrypted, while fire and EMS dispatch, public works, highway departments, school buses, and utilities are usually still in the clear.
For a household, that split is the point. The fire and EMS side of the county is what tells you the road is flooded, the shelter is open, and the power crews are staging at the high school. If your county's fire dispatch is in the clear, a scanner earns its place. If everything you care about is encrypted, save the money.
Look before you buy
Go to the RadioReference database, find your county, and read three things: which agencies are listed, whether their frequencies and talkgroups are marked clear, mixed, or fully encrypted, and whether the system is conventional analog or a digital trunked system such as P25.8 Those three facts decide the purchase. A county still on conventional analog needs a $100 to $150 analog scanner. A county on a P25 trunked system needs a digital trunking scanner, $400 to $650, and the radio's own website will list which system types it decodes. A county where fire and EMS are encrypted needs nothing, and the money goes to a second weather radio and a better antenna.
Smartphone scanner apps stream other people's receivers over the internet. They are a fine way to learn what your county sounds like and a poor plan for an outage, since the internet is the first thing to go. Own the receiver.
Beyond public safety
Any scanner also hears the marine VHF band, where channel 16 at 156.800 MHz is the international distress and calling channel, and the aviation band from 118 to 137 MHz, where you can listen to the airport's tower and the approach controllers.7 Neither is a household necessity. Both are legal, both are educational, and on a coast or near an airport both occasionally carry the first word of something happening nearby.
Rung 4, for the curious
Shortwave and software radio.
Shortwave
Shortwave receivers tune the bands between roughly 3 and 30 MHz, where international broadcasters, time and frequency stations, and the amateur HF bands live. A $50 to $120 portable with single sideband reception lets a household hear regional ham emergency nets, the national news from a broadcaster in another country when domestic sources are saturated, and the standard time signals that let you reset every clock in the house after a multi-day outage. It is not a source of local information; nothing on shortwave will tell you which bridge is out. It is context, and in a regional disaster context is scarce.
Buy one with SSB if you want to hear the ham nets; the ham radio guide explains why regional HF nets are where the real emergency traffic moves. Without SSB, a shortwave radio hears broadcasters only.
Software-defined radio
An SDR is a USB stick the size of a thumb drive that turns a laptop into a receiver covering everything from below the AM band to above the UHF public safety bands. A basic dongle costs $30 to $50; a better one with a wider range costs $100 to $150. Free software turns it into a scanner for analog and some unencrypted digital systems, a display of every aircraft's transponder position within a hundred miles, and a receiver for weather satellite images. It transmits nothing, so it needs no license.
The trade is the computer. An SDR needs a laptop or a small single-board computer running, which means power the power guide did not budget for. For most households, the SDR is a way to learn what is on the air in your area before deciding what to buy, and a hobby afterward. The weather radio and the scanner are the tools that run on a battery for a week.
Turning what you hear into something useful
The monitor's job.
The etiquette and drills guide gives a household net three roles. This is the third one, described in full, because it is the job most often handed to the person with the least instruction.
1. Listen on a schedule, not constantly
Continuous listening exhausts the listener and the battery. The monitor checks the weather radio and the two broadcast stations at the top of every hour for ten minutes, and the scanner during the household net or when something is clearly happening. Between checks, the receivers are off or in alert-standby. The information hygiene guide recommends the same rhythm for a reason: a person who checks every ten minutes learns nothing new and grows more anxious with each check.
2. Write down the source with the fact
"Route 9 closed at the creek" is a rumor. "10:05, NOAA, flood warning extended to midnight; 10:12, fire dispatch, engine 3 reports Route 9 impassable at Mill Creek" is information. The log has four columns: time, source, what was said, and whether it is confirmed. A paper log survives the phone dying and can be read aloud on the next net or handed to whoever relieves you.
3. Apply the two-source rule before passing anything on
An official source, meaning the weather radio, a broadcast station relaying emergency management, or an agency's own dispatch, counts as one. A second official source or your own eyes counts as the second. A scanner transmission is a strong single source; it is what a dispatcher believed at that moment, not a verified fact. Anything with one source gets logged and marked unconfirmed. Anything with two gets passed to the net.
4. Pass information, not adjectives
"The fire department says Mill Creek bridge is impassable" is what the net needs. "It sounds really bad out there" is not. The monitor reports what was said, by whom, at what time, and stops. Deciding what to do about it is the household's job, and doing it calmly starts with a monitor who reports calmly.
5. Know what you will not relay
Names of people involved in an incident heard on a scanner. Anything from a social media post that has not cleared the two-source rule. Anything about the household's own supplies or absences on an open radio channel. The monitor is a filter in both directions.
What to own, and what to skip
The receive-only kit.
Every household · $60 to $110
- Desktop weather radio with SAME alerting, programmed, on the nightstand
- Portable emergency radio with AM/FM and weather band in the kit
- Two local station frequencies on the plan card
- A paper log and a pencil beside the radios
If your county talks in the clear · add $100 to $650
- Analog or digital scanner matched to what RadioReference shows for your county
- Programmed with fire, EMS, public works, and highway; police only if clear
- A printed list of what each programmed channel is
For the curious · add $80 to $270
- Portable shortwave with SSB
- SDR dongle and a laptop you already own
- A roll-up antenna in the window, which improves every receiver on this page
Skip these
- A scanner bought before checking the county. The most common wasted purchase in this section: a digital scanner in a county that encrypted last year, or an analog one in a county that went P25 five years ago.
- Any device that claims to decode encrypted public safety. It does not, and trying is a federal offense.
- A weather radio left on channel 1 because that is where it came out of the box. Look up the frequency. Program the SAME code. It takes ten minutes once.
- Streaming apps as the plan. They are the internet wearing a radio costume. Fine for learning, gone when the fiber is cut.
- Listening without writing. A monitor with no log has an anxious memory and nothing to hand the net.
Where to go from here
Hear it, check it, pass it on.
Emergency Alerts
Wireless alerts, the weather radio, the county's notification system, and what a watch, warning, and advisory each mean.
Read the guide →
Information Hygiene
The verification habits the monitor applies: which sources are authoritative, how rumors move, and when you have enough to act.
Read the guide →
Radio Etiquette and Drills
The household net the monitor reports to, the log format, and the drills that put a monitor at the table every month.
Read the guide →
Sources
Where this information comes from.
All sources accessed September 5, 2026.
- National Weather Service. NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards: more than 1,000 transmitters broadcasting on seven frequencies from 162.400 to 162.550 MHz. weather.gov/nwr
- National Weather Service. NWR frequencies; channel numbers such as WX1 and WX2 have no official significance. weather.gov
- National Weather Service. NWR Station Search: transmitter, frequency, coverage map, and county SAME codes by address, with the instruction to verify which transmitter broadcasts your county's code. weather.gov
- National Weather Service, Philadelphia/Mount Holly office. NOAA Weather Radio FAQ: normal range of a full-power transmitter over level terrain is about 40 miles. weather.gov
- National Weather Service, Springfield, Missouri office. Required Weekly Test of NOAA Weather Radio: conducted every Wednesday between 11 a.m. and noon, weather permitting; postponed to the next fair-weather day. Times can vary by office. weather.gov
- 47 CFR Part 11, Emergency Alert System, section 11.18: Local Primary (LP) stations are designated in each state's EAS plan as the monitoring sources other stations in the local area rely on. Your county emergency management office or state EAS plan identifies the LP-1 and LP-2 stations for your area. ecfr.gov
- 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(g), Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Interception is not unlawful for radio communications transmitted by governmental, law enforcement, civil defense, private land mobile, or public safety systems readily accessible to the general public; by amateur, CB, or GMRS stations; or by marine or aeronautical systems. Interception of scrambled or encrypted communications is prohibited. law.cornell.edu
- RadioReference.com database home page, statistics as displayed September 4, 2026: 226,392 frequencies, 327,574 talkgroups, 4,166 encrypted frequencies, 43,704 encrypted talkgroups, 7,477 trunked systems. radioreference.com