Hi folks!

Even though I’ve been registered here for a few years, I have not been able to participate until now. So I guess that makes me a newcomer here.

I am active in the outdoors frequently, for work, volunteerism and play. I am an office manager and project manager for a small regional construction business. I am also a volunteer for recreational trails and historic preservation organizations. I work with HAM radio volunteers on a local annual sled dog race as well. I am new to HAM radio.

Several years ago, I used to carry a kind of crude, improvised mobile office around in a cheap backpack. One of the items I used to carry a set of old, civilian-multi-channel walkie talkies. The arrangement did not work very well. The talkies would slosh around in the backpack, get turned on by accident, and this would quickly drain the rechargeable AA-size nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries in the talkies so the radios would be worthless (or nearly so) whenever we would pull them out for quick use. These old talkies eventually wore out and we never solved the accidental turn-on issue, so we did without for several years. (None of the talkies we’ve seen advertised looked any better, so we didn’t bother to replace them anyway.)

Fast forward to today. Our group just acquired four new professional-grade radios with lithium-ion battery packs. These are nice, but there are still issues. The antenna for each radio is a removable screw-in kind. It would be best to carry these radios in an EDC setting with the antenna removed. We are also concerned about the sloshing/accidental turn-on effect again. I am also particularly concerned about finding a practical, padded enclosure solution that will keep the radios neat and organized in a padded, protective storage situation so they can be carried safely in an EDC backpack, plucked out of storage, antenna screwed in, unit turned on, and the radios can be employed with a minimum of fuss. This essentially suggests a self-contained pack-within-a-pack scenario.

Is there a practical, high-quality solution for this? What would work best? Assume the EDC pack could be a quality backpack or some other carry scenario. In fact, there could be more than one EDC packing setups depending on who is carrying and where.