Why communication breaks before almost anything else
When people imagine a crisis, they picture darkness, cold, or empty shelves. What they rarely picture is the moment their phone shows “No service” — and how disorienting that single notification can be. Yet DSB is explicit on this point: households should be prepared for information from public authorities even if power supplies, mobile networks, or the internet fail.
This isn’t a fringe scenario. Mobile networks depend on base stations that need continuous power, and most have only a few hours of battery backup. A grid outage of any real duration eventually takes the network down with it. Add network congestion — everyone in a neighborhood trying to call at once — and even a partially functioning system can feel completely dead.
Polish wartime accounts from “Cywil na Wojnie” describe this progression bluntly: when the power goes, and mobile networks follow, the only reliable mass-communication tool left is a battery radio that doesn’t depend on FM transmitters or internet infrastructure. In the most affected front-line areas, broadcast stations without their own backup power simply went silent — sometimes for the moments people needed information most.
The lesson for a Norwegian household isn’t to expect war. It’s to recognize that communication is the first system to degrade in almost every serious disruption — and the first system most families have done nothing to protect.
Your information lifeline: the DAB radio
DSB’s guidance puts a battery, wind-up, or solar-powered DAB radio at the center of household preparedness. NRK P1 serves as Norway’s emergency broadcast channel, designed to continue broadcasting public information even when other media and websites go dark.
A radio that depends on mains power is not part of your preparedness system — it’s a normal-times convenience. What you want is a radio that:
- Runs on standard batteries (AA or similar), not a proprietary rechargeable pack alone
- Has a hand-crank or solar option as backup charging
- Can also serve as a power bank for charging a phone, in dual-purpose models
Models combining DAB/FM radio, flashlight, hand-crank generator, and USB output are widely available at Biltema, Clas Ohlson, and Jula, typically in the 300–600 kr range. This single purchase does more for your information resilience than almost anything else on a preparedness list.
One detail worth noting from the Polish wartime experience: in the most extreme scenarios — total infrastructure collapse — modern DAB and FM radios become entirely useless if transmitters are destroyed. The only thing that still works is an old long-wave/shortwave transistor radio. This is an extreme edge case, far beyond what Norwegian households need to plan for today. But it illustrates a principle worth keeping: redundancy in the type of technology, not just in the quantity of devices, is what survives the worst-case scenario.
Power banks: the unglamorous backbone of communication
A phone with no charge is just a small plastic brick. DSB’s checklist places batteries and charged power banks directly under “Information” — not as an afterthought, but as core infrastructure.
A few practical guidelines:
- Capacity matters. A basic 10,000 mAh power bank is enough for roughly one full phone charge. For a household of three to four people over a couple of days, look toward 20,000–50,000 mAh, or simply keep multiple smaller units.
- Charge them now, not later. A power bank sitting in a drawer at 40% for the past year is not part of your system — it’s clutter. Build a habit of topping up power banks monthly, the same way you’d check a smoke alarm battery.
- Be cautious with improvised high-capacity solutions. Polish sources note that some households turned to repurposed e-bike or e-scooter batteries paired with inverters to create makeshift large-power-station setups. In several documented cases in Ukraine, this led to fires and even explosions. A reputable power station product, used according to the manufacturer’s instructions, is a far safer investment than an improvised battery-and-inverter setup. This connects directly to the guidance on power and portable battery use from earlier in this series — quality and proper use matter more than raw capacity.
The car: an underrated communication hub
Your vehicle is, in effect, a large battery with a built-in radio. DSB notes you can listen to the radio or charge your phone from your car. Beyond that:
- The 12V socket can run phone chargers indefinitely while the engine runs, and for limited periods even with the engine off
- A 12V-to-230V inverter (inexpensive, available at any of the major Norwegian retailers) lets you top up a laptop or small devices — though not high-draw appliances like kettles or hairdryers
- A DAB radio that is integrated and available in your car
- Always run the engine outdoors or in a well-ventilated space. Running a car in a closed garage to charge devices is a well-documented cause of fatal carbon monoxide poisoning — a risk that shows up again and again in wartime survival accounts, and one that applies just as much in a Norwegian winter outage.
A small habit worth adopting: park facing the direction you’d need to leave in. It costs nothing and saves precious minutes if you ever need to move quickly.
Build your family communication chain before you need it
Technology is only half the picture. The other half is agreement — knowing, in advance, what the household does when normal contact fails.
A simple, memorable chain looks like this:
- Account for everyone physically present in the home
- Contact absent family members through normal channels first
- Fall back to an out-of-area contact if local networks are congested — a relative or friend outside Norway, or simply outside your region, to whom everyone reports their status
- Move to an agreed meeting point if no communication is possible at all
The out-of-area contact is a particularly effective trick: local networks often jam up first while long-distance calls or messages still get through. If every family member tries to reach the same external person, you avoid the chaos of five people trying five different things with no idea what anyone else has done.
Define at least two meeting points — one immediately outside the home, and one further away if the immediate area is inaccessible. Make sure children know both, using physical landmarks rather than addresses.
Keep a paper backup of what matters
If your contact list, account recovery codes, and emergency numbers are stored exclusively on a phone that’s now dead, your “backup” plan has a single point of failure. DSB recommends keeping a paper-based list of important telephone numbers — emergency services, doctor, veterinary clinic, family, and neighbors — somewhere accessible without a charged device.
This doesn’t mean writing down passwords carelessly. It means acknowledging that digital access itself can fail, and keeping the minimum information needed to function without it.
Information discipline: knowing what to trust, and how often to check
A working radio or phone doesn’t help if it’s flooded with rumor and speculation. Both DSB and the Danish Forberedt på kriser guide emphasize the same principle: get your information from public authorities and editorially controlled journalistic media, and be especially skeptical of anything designed to provoke fear or anger.
DSB’s guidance is direct about this — hostile actors can deliberately spread false information to destabilize society during a crisis, and the information you receive shapes the decisions you make. A few habits that matter:
- Check who is behind the information before acting on it or sharing it
- Be most suspicious of content that is surprising, frightening, or anger-inducing — these are the reactions disinformation is designed to trigger
- Remember that text, images, audio, and video can all be manipulated
- Set check intervals rather than constantly monitoring. In a stable outage, checking for updates every 30–60 minutes is enough. Constant scanning drains batteries and frays nerves for no benefit.
In a household, designate one person as the “update point” — the person who checks the radio or phone at set intervals and shares a brief summary with everyone else. This keeps the rest of the household focused and calm, rather than everyone independently doomscrolling on a dwindling battery.
Know warning systems
Two systems matter here, and most people have never actually heard them in practice:
- The Emergency Alert System sends alerts directly to mobile phones during acute, life-threatening situations — but it requires 4G or 5G coverage to work.
- Public warning sirens, located in larger cities and conurbations, use distinct patterns: three series of tones with pauses means “Important notice — seek information” (tune in to NRK P1 in Norway, Sveriges Radio P4 in Sweden, Yle Radio Suomi); short, rapid tones for about a minute mean “Danger, risk of attack — seek cover”; and a continuous 30-second tone means the danger has passed.
If you’ve never heard these sirens, it’s worth knowing what they sound like before the day you need to recognize them instantly.
A practical communications kit
Pulling this together into a household shopping list, most of it available at Biltema, Clas Ohlson, or Jula:
- DAB/FM radio with battery, hand-crank, and solar options (300–600 kr)
- Two to three power banks of varying capacity, charged and rotated monthly (150–800 kr each)
- 12V car charger and a basic 12V-to-230V inverter (100–300 kr combined)
- Spare batteries appropriate for your radio and torches
- A printed contact sheet with emergency numbers, out-of-area contact, and meeting points
None of this requires a large budget or a dramatic mindset shift. It requires calmly deciding what your household will do in the first confused minutes when the usual channels go quiet — and making sure the tools to do so are charged, accessible, and familiar before that day arrives.
Beyond the phone network: mesh radios, two-way comms and Starlink
Everything covered so far assumes one of two things: either the mobile network is working in some form, or you’re relying on broadcast radio for one-way information. But there’s a growing category of inexpensive tools that let you communicate directly with family, neighbors, or a local group — without any phone network, internet, or subscription at all. For a household serious about Total Defense-style resilience, this is worth understanding, even if you never need it day-to-day.
Mesh networking: Meshtastic and MeshCore
Meshtastic and MeshCore are open-source projects built around small, low-cost LoRa radio devices — often the size of a pack of cards — that form a mesh network and pass text messages from device to device without any cellular or internet infrastructure. Each device extends the network’s range, so a handful of units spread across a neighborhood, a cabin, and a car can maintain contact over several kilometers, more in open terrain.
Why this is interesting for household preparedness:
- No subscription, no license required in most configurations, since they operate in license-free ISM bands (433 MHz or 868 MHz in Europe)
- Devices cost roughly 300–800 kr each, depending on the model and whether it includes a screen or GPS
- Battery life is excellent — many run for days on a small battery, and can be solar-topped
- Useful for exactly the scenarios this series covers: keeping in touch with family members across a property, coordinating with neighbors during an outage, or maintaining contact with a vehicle or cabin out of normal phone range
The limitation is range and bandwidth — this is for short text messages and location pings, not voice or large data. But for a family communication chain, “I’m safe, heading to meeting point two” is exactly the kind of message this excels at. It’s a low-cost way to add a layer of redundancy that doesn’t depend on any infrastructure at all.
Two-way radios: what requires a license, and what doesn’t
For voice communication without a phone network, handheld radios remain the most established option — but the right choice depends on whether you’re willing to get a license.
No license required:
- PMR446 — small, inexpensive handheld radios (often sold in pairs for 300–500 kr at Biltema, Clas Ohlson, or Jula) using license-free UHF frequencies. Range is modest — typically a few hundred meters to a couple of kilometers depending on terrain — but they’re plug-and-play, require no registration, and are ideal for keeping a family group connected during an evacuation, a hike, or simply around a property during an outage.
- CB radio (27 MHz band) — as noted in Polish wartime accounts, CB radio became one of the few communication tools still functioning when mobile networks failed, particularly among drivers. A basic vehicle CB set typically gives a range of around 4 km in open terrain. While CB’s everyday relevance has faded with smartphone apps, in a crisis, it remains a no-license fallback that many vehicles in Norway and across Europe are still equipped to use.
License required:
- HAM (amateur radio) / HF — by far the most capable option, offering long-range and even global communication depending on band and conditions, plus access to a worldwide network of licensed operators who often organize emergency communication nets. For instance, getting licensed in Norway involves passing an exam administered by the Norsk Radio Relæ Liga (NRRL), but the investment pays off: HAM operators have historically been among the first to establish functioning communication links during major disasters, when other systems have failed. Entry-level HF/VHF/UHF handhelds and base units range widely in price, from a few hundred kroner for a basic handheld to several thousand for a capable HF setup.
- DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) — a digital radio standard offering clearer audio and longer effective range than analog options, often used by clubs, businesses, and some emergency volunteer groups. In Norway, DMR use on amateur frequencies also requires a HAM license, though some commercial/PMR frequencies have separate licensing requirements.
SHTF radio
Operating HAM and DMR is complicated and requires specific competence; it is always best to obtain the license before acquiring HAM or DMR equipment.
Still, in extreme cases, i.e., when the emergency is imminent, it can be reasonable to prioritize purchasing licensed equipment (including exam books) and catch up on the competence afterward, as such equipment may become scarce.
Where does this fit in your plan?
For most households, a set of PMR446 radios is the highest-value, lowest-effort addition — cheap, legal without paperwork, and genuinely useful even outside a crisis (camping, skiing trips, coordinating at a cabin). Meshtastic/MeshCore devices are a step up for households that want longer-range, persistent text communication without ongoing costs.
A HAM license is a bigger commitment — time, an exam, and some investment in equipment — but for anyone genuinely interested in community-level resilience, it connects you to a network of operators who, history shows, are often still on the air when everything else has gone quiet. It’s not a step zero. But it’s worth knowing it exists as the top tier of this ladder.
Starlink Standby: emergency internet for 99 kr/month
One option that has emerged as a serious household resilience tool is Starlink’s Standby subscription. For roughly 99 kr per month, a household that already owns Starlink hardware can maintain an active account in a low-cost dormant mode — and activate full satellite internet service within minutes when needed, without waiting for provisioning or sign-up during a crisis. The hardware itself costs more upfront (typically 2,000–3,000 kr for the dish and router), but for households in areas where terrestrial internet is likely to fail during a grid event or severe storm, Standby makes Starlink a practical emergency backup rather than a primary service. Satellite internet bypasses terrestrial infrastructure entirely — it doesn’t depend on the same cables, towers, or power substations that go down during regional disruptions. During the full outages documented in Ukraine, satellite internet was often the only connection to the outside world still functioning. Norway’s geography — long distances, coastal exposure, and significant rural population — makes this option especially relevant compared to most of Europe. If you already own the hardware, 99 kr a month for a dormant emergency connection is one of the better-value preparedness decisions on this list.
Views expressed are my own.
Next week: Article 9 turns to medical preparedness — what every Norwegian household should have on hand for injuries and chronic conditions, and for access to medical care when accessing normal healthcare becomes harder.
I write about Total Defense, civil preparedness, and resilience from a Nordic perspective. Follow for weekly posts. Questions, challenges, and additions are welcome in the comments.
References:
- “Cywil na Wojnie”, Kaczor, Kafir
- “How you can play your part in Norway’s emergency preparedness”, Direktoratet for samfunnssikkerhet og beredskap (DSB)
- “Forberedt på kriser”, Styrelsen for Samfundssikkerhed
This work, excluding photos, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
