so i've been licensed for about three years now and i keep telling myself i'm going to put together a real go-kit and then never actually do it. after the storms we had last month knocked out power for like four days in my area i decided enough is enough and i actually started pulling stuff together this weekend.

right now i've got my FT-891 set aside for it, a 40ah lithium battery from bioenno, and i grabbed one of those harbor freight pelican-style cases to put everything in. i've got a roll of wire for a random wire antenna and a 9:1 unun i built last year. thinking about adding a small solar panel too but havent figured out which one yet.

my question is — what do people usually forget when they're building these things out? i feel like i have the obvious stuff but i always see experienced guys at field day or SET events pull out things i never would have thought of. like i remember someone had this laminated card with local repeater frequencies and ARES net info and i thought that was so smart because who wants to be digging through their phone when things get hectic.

also not sure if i should keep everything in one case or split it into like a radio case and a separate power/accessories case. curious what people who actually deploy with this stuff think about that.

the laminated card thing is huge and honestly thats the kind of stuff that separates a real go-kit from just a pile of radio gear in a box. i'd also add — coax adapters. every single adapter you think you wont need, pack it. i cant tell you how many times i've shown up somewhere and the connector situation was completely different than expected. PL-259 to BNC, BNC to SMA, whatever. just throw a little ziploc bag of adapters in there and forget about it until you desperately need one.

on the two case vs one case thing, i run two and i love it. radio case is lighter so i can grab just that if i'm going somewhere that already has power. makes logistics way easier when you're hauling stuff into a served agency or an EOC.

one more thing people sleep on — a small notebook and a couple pencils. not pens, pencils. when its cold or wet pens are useless and you will be writing down traffic or logging contacts the old fashioned way at some point if things get bad enough. low tech backups matter.

congrats on actually doing it, most people stay in the 'i should put a kit together' phase forever lol. your solar question — i've had good luck with a 50 watt renogy panel with one of those cheap PWM controllers from amazon. nothing fancy but it keeps my battery topped off during a long deployment without me thinking about it. just make sure whatever panel you get the voltage matches up okay with your charge controller input range, burned out one controller early on being dumb about that.

one thing i'd think about that took me a while to add is some kind of logging setup. even just a clipboard with pre-printed ICS-213 forms if you're doing any kind of served agency work. some EOC managers get real particular about documentation and showing up with actual paper forms makes you look like you know what you're doing even when everything else is chaos. you can download and print those for free off the FEMA site i think.