so ive been a ham for about two years now and just joined my local ARES group and they keep talking about go-kits and being deployment ready and honestly i feel a little lost. like i have a general idea of what it is but when i look at lists online everyone seems to have completely different stuff and some of these guys have like full on pelican cases with everything including the kitchen sink and others just have a small backpack.

my situation is i have an ft-991a and a baofeng as backup, a few different antennas, and i live about 20 minutes from the EOC we'd be supporting. i dont have a generator yet but ive been looking at the jackery stuff or maybe a bioenno lifepo4 battery setup. what do i actually need versus what is nice to have? and how do you power everything if youre at a site for like 12+ hours? that part is what im fuzzy on.

also curious if anyone has a good way to organize cables and adapters because every time i grab stuff in a hurry i end up with a tangled mess and missing the one connector i actually need lol

good timing on joining ARES, they'll teach you a lot. okay so the way i think about go-kits is you build around your mission first, not around gear. for ARES EOC support you probably dont need a full portable antenna setup if there's already infrastructure there, so that changes things a lot compared to someone doing field comms from scratch.

for power the bioenno stuff is solid, i've been running a 30ah lifepo4 for a couple years now and it handles a full 12 hour shift on the 991 without breaking a sweat as long as im not running high power the whole time. jackery works too but the lifepo4 chemistry handles being discharged and recharged more regularly without degrading as fast. get a small PWM or MPPT solar panel too so you can top it off if the deployment goes long.

for cables i just started using those velcro cable ties and labeling everything with a label maker. sounds boring but pulling out a labeled bag that says "SO239 to BNC adapters" is a lifesaver at 2am during an activation. also keep a laminated sheet in the kit with your frequencies, PL tones, and the contact list for your net. you'd be surprised how much your brain goes blank when stuff is actually going down.

honestly the best advice i got was from an old timer in our club who said just go to one activation with basically nothing and see what you wish you had. sounds counterintuitive but you learn real fast what matters. i showed up to a county exercise with my radio and power supply and realized i had no way to log, no headset, and forgot my mic. never made that mistake again.

my kit now fits in a rolling toolbox from harbor freight, took a while to get there though. the 991a is a great radio for this by the way, very versatile. just make sure you have a way to program it quickly if you need to change to a different repeater on the fly, some people keep chirp loaded on a little laptop or even a raspberry pi setup but thats maybe getting ahead of yourself right now.