Well, with HF and the right propagation it could work, some of the time, maybe. 
Prepers often ask in ham forums “I need to reliably communicate to my family, on the other side of this big remote mountain, 250 miles away. What walkie talkie do I need to buy?” Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Even with base station HF gear and proper antennas for near vertical incidence skywave transmission, it’s still iffy. And ham radio isn’t persistent.
Ham radio is sufficiently inefficient and unreliable long distance communication that most hams talk to each other more on the internet about using their radios than they do using their radios. 
