so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and i keep telling myself im going to get a proper go-kit together and then just... never do it. last week there was a pretty bad storm in our county and the ARES group got activated and i showed up with basically nothing useful — just my HT and a charger. felt kind of embarrassed honestly.

so im actually doing it this time. ive got a Yaesu FT-857D that i want to make the main radio for it, thinking i can do HF and VHF/UHF out of one box which seems smart. but i dont even know what container to put everything in, like do people use those Pelican cases or just a rugged plastic tote from hardware store or what. and power is confusing me too — should i start with a LiFePO4 battery or just grab a regular deep cycle AGM for now. the LiFePO4 stuff is expensive but i keep seeing people say it's worth it.

also what do people actually use these things for in a real deployment, like are you mostly doing voice nets or is digital stuff like Winlink more common now. genuinely curious what the emcomm folks here are running.

oh man i went through exactly this about two years ago and i'll just tell you what i wish someone told me — dont overthink the container to start. i spent like two months researching cases and meanwhile had zero kit. grabbed a medium sized Stanley tool tote from home depot for like 30 bucks and it works great, fits the radio, power cables, a small antenna kit, logbook, all of it. if you want something more rugged later you can upgrade but just get something in a bag first.

on the battery question, AGM is totally fine to learn on and figure out your power budget before spending the money on LiFePO4. i run a 35ah AGM right now and it gets me through a 12 hour deployment no problem if im not transmitting constantly. the LiFePO4 stuff is genuinely lighter and better but its not like the AGM will fail you.

as for what you actually do at deployments — around here its probably 60% voice nets on the county repeater and 40% Winlink for message traffic. some of the served agencies have really started leaning on Winlink hard for ICS forms so if you dont have that set up yet i'd put it on the list. its not that hard to get going with a signalink or even JS8Call if you want something a little more flexible.

the 857D is a solid choice for a go-kit, i ran one for years before switching. just make sure you get a good DC cable with an inline fuse right at the battery, dont skip that part, learned that the hard way when i got some arcing at a connector once. not a disaster but not fun either.

one thing people dont think about enough is antenna stuff. like the radio is almost the easy part. having a quick deploy antenna that actually works and that you can set up in 10 minutes in a parking lot or a field — that matters more than which case you picked. i really like the EFHW wire antennas for HF deployments, light and you can get one up in a tree pretty fast. for VHF just a mag mount on a car roof does the job most of the time.