I understand your point of view bigpaul. Each of us has to weigh things and assign priorities and for some, the need to communicate may be so far down the list as to not matter.
Not too long ago I thought maintaining adequate food supplies and defensive resources were the highest priorities for me. I started pondering a few of the ways things could melt down in this world and realized two flaws in my plans.
No matter how well armed you are, you are not going to be able to defend yourself against the federal government. It isn't going to happen. I don't want to ever be on the side that tries such a move as it would be suicide unless undertaken at the multi-state level. When it comes to criminal threats, even a group of people will have holes in their security and no amount of ammunition can overcome human error. A group large enough to have a full-time protective team (police department?) is pretty big indeed when you are reduced to subsistence living.
The other flaw was one of food supplies. Do you prep for two years of eating? What happens when relatives show up after an event? What about your neighbors? No matter how adamant you are right now that nobody gets added later, there will be someone with a skill set your group needs badly enough to include them. I don't want to crawl into a bunker until whatever happens is over, then emerge to find, what? Socialism? Communism? Fascism? A world returned to the law of the jungle? None of those options are satisfactory to me. If you reject any of those possibilities, then the best time to stop them is before they happen. Once in place, such a world might require hundreds of years to restore a federalist republic. We still prep for food security, it just isn't the number one priority any longer.
My wife and I moved to a small enough town to be way down on any lists for big brother control and not on the way to or from anyplace in particular (47 miles from the nearest freeway). Our plan is to bug in right here along with contingency options for temporarily relocating for brief periods. Our neighbors are not all preppers, so we are trying to develop plans with those who are for how to organize first our neighborhood, then our town for self-sufficiency.
Post SHTF, things are not going to be easy for anyone and there will be some members of the free-s#@t army who insist on causing troubles. They might just find themselves hanging around just outside town. Meanwhile, the rest of us will need to have a means to communicate over a five mile radius or so to include some scouting options. As time goes on, we'll want to normalize relations with our neighboring communities and communications will be important for that.
For my own uses, I am looking at a tiered approach to communications. Shortwave listening will always play a part in intelligence gathering since you can listen to much of the world. For two-way communications, first our neighborhood (handheld radios whether FRS, GMRS, or HAM) Secondly our town (mobile radios with some low-utilization repeaters if practical, but otherwise setting up a radio relay system). Finally HF radio systems to increase our area of operations over time. HF radios are the only ones requiring any skill at all, so only a few members of your community need commit the time to study this. I would point out that getting an entry level HAM license requires only a week or so of reading the rules regarding what you can and cannot do, then taking a simple test (or just taking the free practice tests online for a few days until you have the answers down). The license is good for ten years and costs nothing to renew each decade.
