ham radio emergency nets

Actual ham radio emergency nets in north Carolina flooding area. Cellphone service is kaput there.
https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/43107
The guys are providing a valuable service on the w4htp repeater.

I'm thinking some very dedicated folks worked hard in less than optimal conditions to get the repeater back up and running. It takes a lot of work and money to keep them operating.
Just a reminder, support your local repeaters, you never know when it may become crucial.

For our non ham friends, something as cheap as a baofeng radio with an antenna upgrade would be useful to listen to local repeaters. You'd need to learn the repeater frequencies in your area and put those in the radio's memory bank.

Our local club owns at least 10 repeaters that we're able to link for coverage all over East Texas, half of Arkansas and well into Louisiana. My wife and I are charter members and helped to form the club around 1993.

If I've motivated you to purchase a cheap ht such as a baofeng for monitoring local traffic, I'd suggest a slimjim antenna to go with it. You can hang them most every where. I don't know what connectors they have, so you'd need to research that part. One thing you need to know is that vhf/uhf repeaters are vertically polarized, and orienting your antenna horizontally will result in a tremendous reduction in signal strength.