so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month i finally got serious about building a proper go-kit. right now i've got my FT-857D, a roll of coax, my rigrunner power strip thing, and a 35ah LiFePO4 battery i picked up last spring. threw it all in a pelican knockoff case from amazon.

what im realizing is i dont really have a system for it. like the cables are just kind of tossed in there and i'd have to dig around to find the mic or whatever. and i havent thought much about antennas for a deployment situation. at home i've got a dipole up in the trees but obviously i cant bring that somewhere.

been looking at the buddipole and the EFHW kits people put together but honestly im not sure what the right choice is for a kit thats supposed to be usable quickly under stress. also not sure if i should be focused more on VHF/UHF for local ARES stuff or HF if things really go sideways. maybe both? anyway just curious what people have in their kits that they wish theyd thought of from the start.

honestly the thing that took me the longest to figure out was documentation. i had all the gear but if someone else had to use my kit or i was stressed out trying to remember frequencies and offsets in the dark, it was a mess. now i keep a laminated card in the lid of my case with my common freqs, the local ARES net info, and a basic setup checklist. sounds dumb simple but it has saved me more than once at actual deployments.

for antennas, i ended up going with a linked EFHW that i wound myself. cheap to make, no tuner needed for the bands i cut it for, and it packs down to almost nothing. buddipole is fine but its a lot of parts to keep track of when youre tired. whatever you pick just practice setting it up in the dark at least once, seriously.

also dont forget a headlamp, some way to charge your phone, and snacks. the radio stuff people think about but then you show up to a 12 hour RACES activation and youre starving by hour three lol.

im kind of in the same boat as you, just started putting mine together this winter. one thing i did not think about at all was logging. like what do i do if there's no laptop or the batteries die on it. ended up just throwing a waterproof notebook and a couple pens in a ziploc bag and taping it to the inside of the lid. probably not the most elegant solution but it works.

someone at my club mentioned keeping a second small HT already programmed with all the local repeaters in the kit too, separate from the main rig. so if you need to do something quick on VHF you dont have to haul out the whole setup. that made a lot of sense to me.