[quote author=KK4GMU link=topic=135600.msg1254654#msg1254654 date=1644684491
What remains as the best radio methodolgy to communicate with distant parties? Anyrhing aside from Simplex?
[/quote]
Honestly, your screwed for the most part. There is NO commercially available technology INCLUDING ham radio that can be considered reliable enough to ensure continued communications with 'distant parties'. And in truth, ham radio is NOT that great at it to begin with for a host of reasons.
First reason is the license requirement and getting those 'distant parties' to get a license and a radio and put up an antenna to talk to JUST YOU?

sorry but I don't believe they will feel it's that important until it is, and then it's too late.
Second reason is the distant part of 'distant parties'. What is distant? Across the state, several states, coast to coast?? Each of these presents a problem. You ever tried to get a WAS (worked all states) certificate? It's not as easy as you think. I am in Ohio, and I have a BIG antenna tower. You might question this... look me up on QRZ. It's 240 foot tall,, doubt you have one bigger than that, and I can't at will go grab the mike and talk to a specific state with consistency outside of what normal propagation will allow. I slam the west coast and all points west of the Rocky Mountains, but if you are in the plains states,,, I talk right over your head literally. And no LEGAL amount of power is gonna change that. So if your distant party is in that skip zone from you,,,, forget it. Not going to happen, at least not with any regularity and possibly not at all.
So, IF you can get the other party or parties to even get a ham license and operate the radio. Then you need to sit down and look carefully at the propagation maps and see if there is a band and an antenna design that will get you there consistently. Then you need to figure out if you AND them can and will install an antenna of that design in your yard and not get the zoning inspector crawled up your butt about it.
And outside that, you're back to the stone ages.
Of course you MIGHT be able to pull it off on a satellite pass. But again, you are gonna need gear at both ends, a licensed operator at both ends and the satellites are gonna be PACKED with other guys trying to do the same thing you are. So it being a reliable and consistent means of communications is really not possible.
And you need to sit and think about your scenario. What it would take to occur, and what length of time it could last.
If you look at the power grid, it's a hard target. There are a number of places that if attacked by force or a cyber attack, could in theory be disabled for an extended period of time. The connected Internet / Web or whatever you want to call it is NOT that way. There are frankly too many cables to cut and even if they were cut, they can be spliced in a reasonable amount of time. The destruction of a large number of large transmission transformers is not as simple to fix. And a cyber attack, unlinking the connected internet by it's very nature limits the amount of time an outage can occur. Router and firewall configurations are backed up and ready to be restored to the equipment quickly if a router is compromised and would return to service as soon as the configuration was restored. So even a full outage of ALL of the connected Internet couldn't last more than a few days if caused by a cyber attack. The stupidity you see in movies of routers and switches catching fire and burning up due to hackers gaining access and running some piece of code is movie crap and NOT at all possible in the real world. There is no software that will damage hardware short of robots that can beat themself apart, but your PC is not ever gonna get some virus that causes it to never work again.