Family Radio Plan
Fill it in once, on screen or on paper, so nobody has to improvise on a bad day.
PACE: four ways home, in order
Military and emergency planners build communication plans in layers called PACE. Each layer answers the same question — how do we make contact? — under worse and worse conditions. You move down the ladder only when a layer fails, and everyone knows the trigger for each step before anything goes wrong.
The four layers
Read these once, then fill the matching rows below. Keep each layer genuinely different — four flavors of texting is not a plan.
Primary — everyday
- The normal method that already works today
- Usually cell calls or texts
- Fails when towers jam or lose power
Alternate — same idea, other pipe
- A different network path, not a different habit
- Texts over Wi-Fi, mesh app, second carrier SIM
- Trigger: primary is slow, congested, or dead
Contingency — radios out
- Phones are gone; two-way radio takes over
- FRS/GMRS channel from your Radio Reference sheet
- Trigger: cell networks are down outright
Emergency — last resort
- No electronics assumed: runner with a note, fixed meeting point
- Agreed place and time window that never changes
- Trigger: no contact of any kind within the check-in window
Contact sheet
Layer 1 · Primary
Layer 2 · Alternate
Layer 3 · Contingency
Layer 4 · Emergency
Roster & assignments
Give every person one job per layer they can actually do. A seven-year-old "monitors channel 1 with the radio in the kitchen drawer" beats a vague "stay in touch."
| Name | Role | Personal PACE assignment |
|---|---|---|
Check-in schedule
A plan without a clock is a wish. Pick a standing drill day and a daily check-in window; during an incident, everyone transmits inside the window whether or not there is news.
Drill like you mean it
On drill day, skip the Primary layer entirely and run one full round-trip on the Contingency layer: radios out, channels matched, five-minute silence window respected. The first real emergency is a bad place to discover the batteries died.