so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down my go-kit power situation before then. ive been running off a 100ah lifepo4 for most portable ops but the exercise is supposed to run 18 hours straight and i just dont think ill have enough headroom especially if they want me running a 100w station the whole time.

currently thinking either i bring a small honda eu2200i and charge the battery while operating, or just go straight generator power through a good line filter and call it a day. the noise issue is what keeps making me hesitate on the generator route — last time i tried running my ic-7300 off a cheap inverter generator at a campout it was awful, s3 or s4 hash all over 40m. the honda is supposedly way cleaner but ive never personally tested it.

on the antenna side i have a buddipole and a resonant 40m inverted vee i can hang from a 31ft jackite pole. the vee is obviously better for 40 but setup time is longer. trying to figure out if its worth the extra 20 minutes on setup for what might be a mostly local net situation anyway. anyone done longer emcomm exercises with similar constraints and have thoughts on what actually matters vs what you think will matter beforehand

the eu2200i is genuinely cleaner than most cheap inverter gennys ive tested, but youre still gonna want a filter between it and your radio. i use a westmountain rigrunner with a ferrite on the dc line and that cleans up most of the remaining garbage. running the radio off the battery while the generator charges it is honestly the best of both worlds — the battery acts like a big filter cap and you get clean power to the rig. just watch your charge rate vs discharge rate math so you dont end up net negative over 18 hours.

for the antenna honestly for a county-level exercise on 40m the inverted vee is probably overkill unless youre trying to hit repeaters or simplex nodes more than 60-70 miles out. the buddipole will get you there for local and regional stuff and you wont hate yourself at hour 14 when youre tired and everything hurts. ive done 24 hour SET deployments and simple is almost always better because something will go wrong and you want mental bandwidth left over to actually operate.

yeah the honda should be fine, a buddy runs his ts-590 straight off one with just a basic filter and its quiet enough. that said i'd still use the battery as a buffer like the other guy said, just makes sense.

one thing people dont think about on longer exercises is the fuel situation — eu2200i at partial load is pretty sip on gas but 18 hours is still like 2-3 gallons depending on how hard youre running it. bring more than you think you need because nothing kills an exercise faster than running out of fuel at hour 11 and having to beg someone for a gas can.