When faced with an unprecedented challenge, the first instinct is to focus on survival and the immediate goal. You don’t have time to sweat the small stuff—the details feel secondary. But as you push through and reflect later, you realize the details were the difference between success and failure. Experience matters because it teaches you which details to prioritize when the stakes are high. Hurricane Helene brought devastation like no one had seen before. It was the kind of event where details mattered, and Kenny Cornett, founder of Appalachian Technologies, knew precisely how to act on them.
“The violence was incredible.”
As dawn broke the morning after the storm, it painted a grim picture of Kenny’s eastern Tennessee home. His family farm, and all of his neighbors, had suffered significant damage. Knowing the destruction had to be more widespread, he immediately contacted local EMA groups and got to work.
Once Kenny had hooked up with the emergency management teams, a bigger picture of the chaos began to take shape. A hospital the next county over had been flooded - patients and caregivers were stranded on the roof. A truck from a plastics factory filled with workers trying to escape the storm had gone missing somewhere along the river. Then reports of entire communities - not just people - were missing began to come in.
Making all of this worse was the fact that traditional communication lines were just gone.
- Cell towers were down
- Internet was out
- Off-grid communications like HAM radio repeaters were also offline due to the storm.
As volunteers came in, the need for more ability to organize and communicate quickly added to the problems of the storm itself. It was one thing to have dozens of volunteers willing to help - it was another to send people out into the unknown without a lifeline to call for help. The chance to make things worse was very high. And it wasn’t like everyone had a radio - most of the radios in use were police and fire department-specific UHF/VHF radios - not the kind of device that you can hand out to anyone in an emergency and expect it to work.
“One of the things that you train for when you do, like urban search and rescue is, you know like USAR stuff is, take a map with you because street signs will be down and this that and the other. But you expect the streets to still be there. [...] Entire roads are gone, entire mountainsides slid off into the river valley. And so the topology is not what it was like. There's no road there anymore. There is no neighborhood. There is no mountainside”
- Kenny Cornett
That’s where Kenny came in. Kenny just so happened to be sitting on a stockpile of around 120 meshtastic radios. As a former firefighter, mechanical engineer, and die-hard prepper - he had been working on developing a meshtastic radio called the RM-1 for emergency use. He had already spent a year working on the design and had several units that were either of the final design or working prototypes - roughly 18 portables and 12 infrastructure nodes. The rest were all less-durable radios from other makers or made from Kenny’s designs predating the RM-1.
All the radios had one thing in common: They all ran Meshtastic. This meant they all:
- Acted as repeaters for other Meshtastic radios, boosting range
- Used very little power
- Could send GPS information from node to node
- Were securely encrypted for the safety of the volunteers
- And were easy to use
Working with the EMA’s - Kenny established an area of operations, then began plotting a coverage map using Mesh Planner. This allowed him to model where to put infrastructure nodes to maximize coverage. Practically, this often centered around Churches in the area - which quickly were established as ad hoc distribution centers, but also usually had crosses high up on top of hills he could attach the repeaters to.
“[the Churches] were doing everything that everyone assumed FEMA would be doing that they didn't. And so it became pretty easy to be like, okay, well, we're going to go to such and such church, with all of these things and drop them off and just tell people: ‘wear it like [this, or] toss it in your backpack, put it in your pocket.’”
- Kenny Cornett
Once he established the repeater locations, he began distributing the radios and training the volunteers. Because not all the radios were the same, he handed out radios based on the job at hand. Rescue teams and chainsaw crews got RM-1s. Their durability, insane battery life, and improved antennas meant that Kenny could get frequent GPS updates from the teams doing high-risk jobs. Devices with smaller batteries were given to supply runners and other crews with less risk.
Because Kenny was a former first responder and had either done or directly supported many of the jobs that the teams were carrying out, he could manage the radios to suit the needs of each team. Once a supply convoy made it to a distribution center, for instance, he could remotely manage the radio to stop sending frequent GPS updates, increasing battery life and reducing traffic on the mesh network. If a chainsaw crew needed to get to work outside the mesh coverage, he could set up rally points for them to send a runner in case they needed to get in contact again. This attention to detail took these administrative tasks off the workers and enabled them to focus on their current tasks.
For security and just to de-clutter the notifications for first responders, Kenny moved all of his nodes to a new channel - keeping the main public channel on the nodes but moving them to a secondary position. Only the volunteers he was coordinating with could get each other’s information. It also stopped workers from getting random messages from hobbyists or a random person from a commercial flight sending a salutation from thousands of feet overhead (something that happens frequently on meshtastic.)
Again, it’s a good detail - not just because of security but because it kept workers focused and not sucked into their phones.
Weeks into the relief efforts, the details Kenny had focused on in his radio design proved critical. Even as Starlink began providing internet access, it couldn’t replace the RM-1’s power efficiency and reliability. Where Starlink drained a battery in just over a day, the RM-1 kept running for weeks. Every watt saved meant fewer trips hauling fuel up mountains—a small detail that made a massive difference in the long run.
You might be thinking, ‘I don’t have 100 radios sitting in my garage.’ And that’s okay—most people don’t. But the lesson here isn’t about stockpiling gear; it’s about being prepared with the right tools for the job. At a minimum, ensure your PACE Plan includes a HAM radio and a reliable mesh radio like the RM-1. Together, these tools give you the flexibility to stay informed and maintain contact no matter what. If you can do more, consider picking up a few extra Meshtastic nodes or radios to help your family or community stay connected when it counts.
Disasters like Helene remind us of the critical importance of attention to detail in your preparation. Kenny’s distillation of experience into the design of the RM-1 and how equipping your community with the right tools can transform chaos into organized relief. There are so many more details that Kenny mentioned that were important during the relief efforts - many of which we’re going to spin off into guides and tutorials to help you learn the skills you need to be an asset to your community, like Kenny was. And while we pray that you will never have to go through a disaster on the scale of Helene, we confident in equipping you with tools and skills that won’t let you down if you do.
If you are interested in learning more about the RM-1, pre-orders are live on our site now. You can also check out the video below. And please follow us and like and share this post on X, Instagram, and Facebook - it really helps us get stories like this told and skills and great gear to you.
