We're in what's the last "nearly rural" part of Southeast PA - Upper Bucks County. We've got hunting grounds and large state parks and plenty of places where you drive into deep woods to get to homes. The Bucks County Radio system (currently on a digital 500Mhz system, switching to digital 700Mhz system soon) has coverage challenges up here due to the hilly terrain (lots of signal shadowing), digital signal wonkiness, and a simple lack of repeater sites. Additionally, while 700 Mhz propagation solves for some of these issues, there's the basic fact that HF Frequencies (like the "11 Meter" band of CB radio) have reach (outdoors) and you don't need a huge amount of power to get through trees and leaves, and you get all kinds of interesting and wonderful "knife-edging" effects to get over hills. So radio-wise, when we abandoned the 46 Mhz FM system about 12 years ago for the 500 Mhz Digital UHF system. When that happened we lost a lot in terms of coverage and increased - by a factor of 100 - the costs of radio systems.

My township couldn't then and now can't afford to buy new radios on the new new system. An adjoining township is spending over $35,000 to equip two police cruisers and three cops with the new radios. It's expensive.

Over here, where I'm the Emergency Management Coordinator, I'm going into year 8 without any kind of county emergency radio - the one I had during Sandy was borrowed from a Fire Company, and although I still have it, it's not technically for the use of the Township.

The point is a need for local communications. Our main need is radio coverage that is about a 5 mile radius about a point for a cost of nearly free and without needing to wait for anyone with special licenses to show up, if ever.

There are four townships up here that have an implicit agreement to use one of the township buildings as Unified Command during incidents - and reliable communications between the townships and within the township is needed typically on a scale of 5 miles point to point, from any given on-the-ground location. This is backup for the cellular network.

Most of the time, cellular coverage works - although we don't have a nearby Verizon CDMA-equipped tower, there are now several Sprint sites and they share CDMA duties for at least voice and SMS.

Data service is getting better as the area builds up. For GSM, we have only AT&T, and it appears that T-Mobile does not have a roaming agreement with them up here, because I'll get 5 bars of 4G on an AT&T SIM, and 0 bars "Emergency Only" in the same phone with a T-Mobile SIM.

But it's that "plan C" stuff that makes me worry - when the county system is down or overloaded, or the cell sites fail because of poor backhaul infrastructure strategy, I just want to be able to get some communications up and running between maybe 20 people. So that's why I've been thinking CB Radio on Channel 9 as a backup.