so ive been meaning to do this for like two years now and after the storm we had last month that knocked power out for three days i finally stopped procrastinating. got a pelican case, threw in my FT-891, a little switching power supply, some coax, and a random wire antenna i wound up myself. also tossed in a notebook and a few pens because i know from ARES meetings that logging stuff on paper is still important when everything else goes sideways.

the thing is i feel like im definitely forgetting something obvious. my elmers always talk about having a go-kit ready but whenever i ask what exactly should be in it i get a different answer every time. one guy says always have a backup HT, another says dont bother with HTs for serious emcomm work, another says bring a laptop, another says paper only. its like everyone has a slightly different philosophy and i cant quite figure out what the baseline should be.

right now i think my biggest gaps are probably power — i have a 30ah lithium battery but no solar panel yet — and i have zero documentation with the kit. like if someone else had to operate it they wouldnt know frequencies, repeater tones, nothing. anyone been through this process and figured out what the non-obvious stuff is that you wish youd included from the start?

the documentation thing is huge and honestly most people skip it. i laminated a little card with all the local repeater info, the simplex calling freq, my callsign phonetics, and even a basic ICS message format reminder. took maybe an hour to make and its been the most useful thing in the whole kit multiple times. when youre stressed and tired at 2am your brain does not remember tone squelch codes trust me.

also — and this might sound dumb — a small roll of electrical tape and a couple zip ties. i cannot tell you how many times ive seen guys at actual deployments scrambling for something to secure a coax or label a connector. the fancy stuff is great but those little things save you.

your power setup sounds reasonable for a start. id say get even a small 50 watt panel before you think youre done, three days is fine on 30ah if youre smart about it but longer events get dicey real fast especially if its cloudy.

yeah the different-answer problem is real, i went through the same thing when i was building mine. i think what happened for me is i just started treating it like a camping checklist — go out and actually USE it a few times before you need it for real, and every time youll go oh i wish i had brought X. done a couple SOTA activations with mine just to shake it out and i found like four things i needed to fix or add.

one thing i dont see you mention is headphones. operating in a noisy environment like an EOC or outside with generators running, being able to plug in headphones is way more useful than i expected. doesnt have to be anything fancy, those old aviation-style ones work great.