so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up and im trying to nail down a solid portable setup that doesnt fall apart when things get weird. last exercise we had some real headaches with power and i want to get ahead of it this time.

running an IC-7300 as my main HF rig and a TM-V71A for local VHF/UHF coordination. the 7300 pulls around 22A at full power which isnt insane but when you add the V71A and a laptop for logging plus a little LED work light it starts to add up fast. last time i was running everything off a 100Ah AGM and by hour four i was watching that voltage drop and sweating a little.

thinking about adding a small generator to the mix this time, maybe a Honda EU2200i or the Yamaha EF2000iS. both are inverter types so the clean power shouldnt mess with the radio but ive heard some guys say they still get RFI from certain generators even the inverter ones. anybody actually noticed that with either of those brands specifically. also wondering if its worth running the generator just to top off the battery rather than powering the radio directly — like keep the battery as a buffer between the generator and the rig.

for antennas im planning a 40/20/15/10 fan dipole up in whatever trees i can find, center fed with some 450 ohm ladder line into a 4:1 balun and then coax to the shack. its worked okay before but the feedline run is usually kind of a mess and i feel like im leaving signal on the table. open to suggestions if anybody has a slicker field antenna solution that doesnt take forever to deploy.

the EU2200i is what I run and honestly the RFI has been a non-issue for me. I do keep it at least 50 feet from the operating position and run the power cable away from antenna feedlines, that stuff matters more than people think. the one time I got noise it turned out to be a cheap extension cord I grabbed last minute — replaced it with a decent 12 gauge cord and it went away. your idea of using the battery as a buffer is actually solid, a lot of EMCOMM guys do exactly that. generator charges the battery, radio runs from the battery, you get clean power and the generator doesnt have to run constantly either which is nice for fuel economy and noise at the site.

on the antenna side — fan dipoles are fine but for quick deploy I've been really happy with a simple EFHW with a 49:1 UNUN. one wire, one support, done. not as clean as a dipole probably but when you're trying to get on the air in 20 minutes it's hard to beat. I use a Chameleon MPAS Lite as a backup option if the site doesnt have good trees, telescoping mast gets it up fast.

yeah the yamaha and honda are both fine on RFI in my experience, the cheap chinese inverter generators are where you can get into trouble. had a buddy bring one to a field day a few years ago and we could hear it on 40m even with it pretty far away, eventually we just shut it off and ran off batteries for the night.

one thing i'd add — if you're doing an ARES exercise and there's any chance of running comms for more than like 6 hours seriously consider a second battery. 100Ah sounds like a lot but with that load you described you're probably pulling 15-18A average and that math gets uncomfortable fast especially if you're not fully topping it off between ops. two batteries on a paralleling setup gives you way more breathing room and if one goes weird you still have the other.