Metacrisis Action Lab #2
Off-Grid Comms with Signals Rising
When the grid goes down (a blackout, a hurricane, a crowd that overwhelms the cell towers), the people who can still reach each other are the ones who set up their comms and practiced before they needed them.
June 25, 2026 · Lightning Lofts, Brooklyn, NY
Made by AI from the write-up on this page, so the room reaches people who could not be in it. Not a podcast episode.
§97.403
your right to call for help on any frequency
P.A.C.E.
the four-layer comms plan
Rooftop
where the radios came out
What this was
The Metacrisis Action Labs are the level-up-yourself counterpart to the Metacrisis Salons: less talk, more hardware in your hands. Action Lab #2 brought in Spike from Signals Rising, a radio mutual-aid nonprofit, to teach off-grid emergency communications: what you actually do when the cell network goes dark.
The room was mostly neighbors from a few blocks in every direction, drawn to the mutual-aid side more than the radio side. Spike walked the group through the essentials: the disaster lifecycle and where communications fail, the radio spectrum, the ladder of radio services from free walkie-talkies up to licensed ham, the one FCC rule that lets anyone call for help in a life-or-death emergency, and how to build a layered PACE plan before you need it. Then everyone grabbed a handheld and went up to the rooftop to use them.
Who led it
Spike
A landscaper and gardener by day, and a radio operator with Signals Rising, a nonprofit that gives community and mutual-aid groups the hardware, training, and licensing support to stand up their own emergency communications. They build solar-powered repeaters (sell one, give one to a mutual-aid group) and run hands-on workshops like this one across the country.
The session
How the night unfolded
Intros · the whole room
Everyone said where they live and why they came: Carroll Gardens, Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, West Harlem, the Lower East Side. Climate-anxiety facilitators, a film-production veteran, an NYC Mesh volunteer, mutual-aid organizers. More neighbors than radio nerds.
Why comms fail · Spike
The disaster lifecycle: before, the immediate 0–72 hours, the 1–2 week stretch, the long tail. Cell towers and the power grid go down in the immediate phase, and neighborhood mutual aid is faster than FEMA in the first 72 hours.
How radio works · Spike
Spectrum, propagation, antennas, power, terrain. The headline: get high. VHF/UHF is line-of-sight, so antenna height beats raw wattage, and a repeater on a tall roof multiplies everyone's range.
The legal on-ramp · Spike
The ladder of radio services (FRS, MURS, CB, GMRS, ham), and FCC Rule §97.403: in a true emergency, anyone can use any radio on any frequency to call for help.
Make a plan · Spike
PACE planning, operational nets and net control, signal reports, and the civilian off-grid ecosystem (Meshtastic mesh, HF, satellite). There's already a citywide LoRa mesh humming over New York.
To the roof · everyone
Grab a handheld, learn to switch it to low power, and go.
Hands on the hardware · everyone
FRS handhelds out, tuned to a shared channel: the same family-radio frequencies kids' walkie-talkies run on, used correctly and legally.
The origami relay · partners
A communication game: one partner folds an origami fortune-teller while the other relays the instructions over the radio, without looking. Clarity under constraint is the whole skill of emergency comms.
What we walked away knowing
Reference
The cheat sheet
The reference tables from the session, rebuilt so you can come back to them. Tap one to open it; scroll sideways on a phone.
Go deeper
Resources & where to plug in
From the Archives
Coming up
See past events
Metacrisis Action Lab No. 1 · Jun 23, 2026
Two Weeks, No Grid
Could your household last fourteen days without power, water, or internet? Neighbors mapped the full plan together, from water storage to rice math to backup comms.
Metacrisis Action Lab No. 3 · Jun 28, 2026
Rooftop Reciprocity
A bare Brooklyn rooftop became food, medicine, and pollinator habitat in an afternoon. A hands-on lab on growing resilience into the city, one corner at a time.
Metacrisis Salon No. 11 · Jun 6, 2026
How we build an Ecocivilization
The system extracts and accelerates because that is what it was built to do. A night on what an ecocivilization would look like, and how you grow one inside the shell of the old.