so ive been a ham for about three years now and honestly i keep putting off building a proper go-kit because every time i start researching it i get completely overwhelmed by all the different opinions out there. some people are running these massive pelican cases with everything including the kitchen sink, others are saying keep it simple and just throw a HT and some extra batteries in a backpack.

my situation is im in a suburban area, got my general ticket last year, and i registered with our county ARES group but havent really been activated for anything yet. mostly i want to be ready if something actually happens - we had a bad ice storm two winters ago that knocked out power for almost a week and i was basically useless radio wise because i hadnt thought any of this through.

right now i have an IC-7300 at home which obviously isnt going anywhere easily, and a baofeng uv-5r that i know i know, but it works. thinking i might want something in the middle - like a decent portable HF/VHF rig. anyway what do you all actually run in your kits and what do you wish youd done differently when you were setting up

the baofeng will actually get you further than you think for local emcomm stuff, dont count it out just because the elmer crowd sniffs at them. that said yeah having something that can do HF when repeaters are down is worth the investment if you can swing it.

for a go-kit i went through like four iterations before landing on something i was happy with. honestly the biggest thing i wish someone had told me early on is to figure out your power situation FIRST before anything else. doesnt matter what radio you have if you cant run it for more than two hours. i use a 30ah lifepo4 battery with a small solar panel and a decent pwm charge controller, fits in a medium sized tool bag along with my IC-705 and a linked dipole i can string up anywhere. the 705 is kind of perfect for this use case if its in your budget, runs on like 5 watts if you need to stretch battery life.

also practice actually deploying the thing. i did a full setup drill in my backyard one saturday afternoon and realized my coax connectors were all finger tight and half my adapters were missing. stuff like that only shows up when you actually try to use it under pressure.

similar boat here, got activated once for a public service event and showed up feeling totally unprepared even though technically i had all the gear. the mental side of it is weird - like knowing where everything is and being able to set up without having to think about it matters way more than having the fanciest equipment.

one thing our ARES group coordinator always says is that your go-kit should be ready to grab and go in under five minutes. so once you build it, leave it built. dont borrow stuff out of it for home use and forget to put it back. that sounds obvious but i definitely raided my kit for a connector once and then forgot about it for like six months lol