Americans today have unlimited access to information, from real-time reporting of world events to your friends posting what they made for dinner on Instagram. It’s like drinking out of a fire hose.
Ask yourself this – if a disaster knocked out your smart phone, your cable and your Internet, how would find out what’s going on, or find out what you need to know to survive?
Getting timely information during and after a disaster could mean the difference between life and death for you and your family. If you’re preparing for hard times, you need to own at least one emergency radio, and at a minimum, it needs to pick up the AM/FM bands and NOAA weather radio frequencies.
My handy-dandy emergency radio
This baby is my primary go-to radio if the manure hits the oscillating air circulator. She’s the Kaito Voyager KA-500, and she gets the job done.
(For the record, I’m not getting a dime for pitching this radio. I don’t have sponsors because I’m not important and no one loves me – I’m singing this radio’s praises because it does a lot for an affordable price.)
First of all, the KA-500 picks up not only AM/FM and NOAA bands, but also shortwave radio bands. The radio can function as a NOAA all-hazards radio with the click of a knob, meaning the radio will come to life if it picks up a valid emergency alert tone.
If you’re into shortwave radio, I strongly suggest you spend a few dollars more to buy a portable hand-reel antenna that will significantly augment your ability to pull in shortwave frequencies.
As for power, the radio is redundantly redundantly redundant. Hand-cranking it for a minute gives it hours of power, or if it’s sunny, you can flip up a solar panel and power it that way. It also can run on three good old-fashioned AA batteries.
Bells and whistles
The KA-500 comes with three built-in lights: a reading light, a flashlight, and a flashing red emergency beacon.
It also boasts the ability to power cell phones with the proper attachments, like almost all hand-crank radios do. However, if you’re smart, you’ll own an alternate way to do that, such as a portable solar panel – you’ll spend a lot of time turning that crank and adding wear and tear to your radio for a little bit of juice.
The KA-500 a great little radio that works for your home or your bug-out bag. It retails for $50, and can be ordered on Amazon or the Kaito website.
Remember redundancy
Remember the cardinal rule I wrote about in an earlier post – two is one, and one is none. I’m not advising you to spend $100 to by two Kaito radios, but you’ll want to have some sort of backup radio just in case.
I own multiple radios, which I’ll be writing about in future posts – for example, I have a dedicated portable shortwave radio; while the Kaito is an all-around handy product, tuning in shortwave frequencies with a small plastic knob isn’t ideal.
I can’t stress enough that knowledge is power in an emergency. Without it, you won’t make it.