Today's communications capabilities are sophisticated and ubiquitous. Yesterday's science fiction is today's commonplace. As we have become more dependent on these systems, the impact of even brief service interruptions becomes less tolerable. What will still work during the worst-case scenario? If your primary and alternate communications systems are offline due to infrastructure damage or compromise, how do you communicate outside the impacted area?

High Frequency (HF) radio provides short, medium, and long-distance communications, one-to-one and one-to-many, voice and data, and is not affected by loss of conventional communications infrastructure. This presentation will discuss how HF radio works and can provide the user with a resilient contingency communications system. We will discuss the advanced features available with modern HF radio systems that distinguish HF from the old voice-only systems and ham radio (amateur radio), inaccurately portrayed in World War II and science fiction movies. We will illustrate with a case study how HF radio can be integrated with a business or government's day-to-day communications systems to provide this fallback capability. Finally, we will discuss a roadmap for business or government entities to add HF radio to provide a resilient contingency communications system.