I’ve got a pair of 20$ Baofeng walkies and a Garmin InReach mini, ideally I’d like anyone else in my group to have some kind of satcom for long range communication that’s not reliant on ground based station. Currently I use a month-by-month plan because I don’t need it 24/7 but if I’ve understood correctly you can prepay for months or even years of usage. Text messages to normal phones or other inreach devices, GPS and weather updates even when there’s no service. How well the weather update function will work in a total grid down situation, I have no idea but it’d be nice to know if a real gale is on the way. Hopefully the Iridium satellites will be up for a long time.
What’s your opinion for relatively portable short-medium range communications? IE 5-25km in less than ideal terrain. I don’t have much experience with anything other than my cheap walkies on a bike tour with a friend and we would start having difficulty communicating within 2km of each other on winding roads, having something with slightly better range would be nice. There’s an ICOM ProHunt with a very long flexible antenna in the reception at my job we use to talk to the ferry but that’s with constant clear line of sight over a lake around 15km wide, on days with bad weather we use cell phones because the radio traffic becomes undecipherable.