On Thursday evening I was part of the local Emergency response to a natural gas explosion/event in Massachusetts. I’m on my town’s Auxiliary Fire Emergency Management team and was sent as mutual aid. Because power had been cut to the area, cell service became spotty and Ham radio/Radio comms were our only reliable means of communication. During the height of things, my wife stopped receiving my texts, and couldn’t get through by phone. One thought I had was to set up a SDR dongle for her laptop, and I could transmit my call sign occasionally as I monitor comms and she could listen in. Any particular brand I should look at?

I like the RTL-SDR.com unit...if you wanna spend about 3x that Look up the AIRSPY Mini it's a solid choice!

@gcw may or may not concur.

ETA: looks like the Mini is no longer avail??????????

1.  Lots of options for sdr dongles. +1 for rTL-sdr

2.  What the hell happened?  It seems incredible they lost all pressure control on the system.

The rtl-sdr is the go to. $20 is heard to pass up. For $26 it even comes with a decent antenna.

That said why do you want to go with a SDR? A simple HT or scanner would allow her to listen with a better receiver than a SDR.

APRS in the area? That would be an easy one for her to track you.

RTL-SDR for sure, don't use the junk antennas that come with them though.  Use SDR# (pronounced sdr sharp) as the program recieve.  If you want you can pipe the audio from SDR# into DSD+ using a virtual audio cable and then you can listen to P25, DMR, etc.  It's a little bit of a learning curve at first but then it gets easy.

Could you just leave her a handheld radio so she could also monitor your communications?  If you lose power or windows decides to do updates at an unopportune time you may run into issues in an emergency.  Otherwise APRS world work if you're able to get into an I-Gate.  You would have to guaranty an internet connection for her to be able to reach WWW.APRS.FI .  Alternatively you could setup a basestation to receive the APRS packets directly but now you're back to square one and needing a computer powered up and connected to the radios.  I suggest either getting her a handheld scanner or giving her a handheld radio and just contacting her direct through whatever service you're both capable of operating on (Amateur, FRS, GMRS, ect.)

The new antennas that come with the kits are really good. It has a suction cup mount and bendy base mount too

For this application I'd use an old scanner, just about any of them will do ham 2M FM without issue.
Way easier to set up and use than running a SDR app and dongle. Higher voice audio quality as well.

Probably show up used on ebay for the same price point.

Otherwise, I've been pretty happy with the Nooelec SDR dongles on amazon.

I was visiting my parents in Maine this past week, it made the news there.

what would you be transmitting on fire freqs or ham freqs?

Old scanner for sure, or a cheap handheld. FAR less complexity.

Way too much complexity I'd think. I would suggest a Baofeng UV-B5, or even the miniature BF-T1.

Best suggestion is to get her a Technician license so she can just communicate as needed.