Judah wrote in message . ..
Seems to me the easiest solution in this case is to carry a handheld and
some spare batteries.

Well, maybe. First see a recent post by Roy Smith wrt how useful
he and a friend found a handheld to be when they experienced a
radio failure in busy NYC airspace (an area with generally very
good radio reception, though busy frequencies). At a minimum
for a handheld to be useful, you need a headset adaptor and a
cable so that the duckie antenna can be situated on a window,
preferably a connection to an external antenna.

Even with a headset adaptor and an external antenna connection
and cable, personally if I were flying single-pilot IFR in
rough IMC, digging out the handheld and setting it up would
be pretty low on my list of priorities.

But perhaps that's just me, and other pilots are more capable
of aviating and navigating while digging stuff out and setting
it up.

Cheers,
Sydney