so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly i keep putting off building a proper go-kit and then every time there's a storm or some local emergency activation i feel totally unprepared and kind of embarrassed about it. our county ARES group had a drill last month and i showed up with basically just my HT and a half charged battery pack which... yeah not great.

anyway i finally decided to actually do something about it. i picked up a surplus pelican-style case at a garage sale and i have a spare Yaesu FT-857D that could probably live in there permanently. my question is really about power — do most people go with a dedicated sealed lead acid battery or is lithium the way to go now? i know lithium is lighter but i've heard some people are nervous about it in enclosed cases or whatever. also should i be pre-programming all the local repeaters or just load whatever chirp file i normally use? wondering if anyone else has gone through this and what you wish you'd done differently

been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and honestly the battery question comes up every single time. my take — start with a sealed AGM, something in the 33ah range, because they're cheap, forgiving, dumb easy to maintain, and you dont have to babysit them the same way. once you get your kit dialed in and know what your actual power consumption looks like over a 12 hour deployment then you can think about upgrading to lithium if weight is a real concern. i see guys drop 300 bucks on a fancy lifepo4 before they even know what their radio draws and then they show up to an activation without a way to charge it because they forgot the charger profile is different.

for programming — definitely dont just use your everyday chirp file. make a separate go-kit specific file, put your local ARES simplex frequencies at the top, then the primary repeaters, then mutual aid stuff. label everything clearly because when things get stressful you dont want to be scrolling through 200 memories trying to find the hospital net frequency. took me way too long to figure that out.

just went through this exact thing a few months ago lol. i ended up going with a 20ah lifepo4 from bioenno and its been fine in my case, i dont seal it up completely when its charging though just to be safe, probably overkill but whatever. the weight difference vs the AGM i had before was pretty significant for lugging stuff up stairs at a served agency.

one thing i wasnt expecting — having a laminated sheet inside the kit with your callsign, your local net info, and like a quick startup checklist is really useful. sounds dumb but when you havent touched the kit in 6 months and someones asking you to get on the air in 10 minutes your brain just goes blank