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Should traditional modern communication systems be unavailable, having a backup way to communicate far distances is a smart thing to have.

It's not uncommon for large storms to take out cellphone and land line phone systems and with them likely goes the internet as well.

The easiest and most useful backup option is one that's been around a very long time - and it's long range radio communication via voice and telegraph.

You may have heard it referred to as Ham radio which is slang for Amateur Radio.

Back in the late 1980s, an oral surgeon was in the middle of a two-week raft trip down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon in Arizona, when disaster struck.

He and two other men were on the bank, getting their 18-foot (5.4-meter) raft ready for a trip down the Crystal Rapids when it got caught in a wave, filled with water and ripped the line from their hands.

So many of us have become accustomed to having a cheap and nearly unlimited supply of electrical power available to us 24-7 that when a power outage happens, it becomes a disruptive event.

Short term outages of only a few hours or so are usually easy enough to handle, but what if the power doesn't come back for days, or weeks?

There are plenty of things you can do ahead of time to ensure that you can cope with an extended power outage without a majorly detrimental impact on your way of life.