so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable station that can run for 12+ hours without shore power. been doing this a while but honestly every time i set up for a long field deployment i second-guess myself on the power side.

right now i'm thinking a 100ah lithium battery with a 30a solar panel as a trickle top-off during the day, and then i have a small honda eu2200i as a backup if we really need it. the radio is an IC-7300 which draws maybe 20-22 amps at full power transmit but we're mostly going to be running 50-60% for net control stuff so probably averaging closer to 8-10 amps with receive cycles factored in.

the antenna situation is where i'm less sure. i have a buddipole that i've used a ton but i'm also thinking about just throwing up a linked dipole on a 31ft spiderpole — way simpler to tune and honestly more efficient i think. we'll mostly be on 40 and 80 for local and regional traffic, maybe some 20m if we need to reach the state EOC.

anyone done similar setups for a long exercise? my main worry is that 100ah wont be enough if we have a cloudy day and the solar doesn't contribute much. i dont want to be cranking the generator all afternoon because that draws attention and is just annoying.

the math works out pretty close honestly. if you're averaging 10 amps draw and you've got 100ah usable (assuming lithium so basically the full capacity unlike lead acid) thats theoretically 10 hours at that rate. but you'll want to stay above 20% or so to keep the battery healthy long term so realistically call it 80ah usable which gets you 8 hours. so yeah a cloudy day with no solar contribution and you're cutting it close for 12 hours. i'd either grab a second 100ah battery — they're not that heavy if it's LiFePO4 — or just accept the generator is going to run a couple hours. the eu2200i is quiet enough that it really isnt that big a deal, i've run mine at field day and people forget its even there after a few minutes.

on the antenna, ditch the buddipole for this one. linked dipole on the spiderpole is going to outperform it on 40 and 80 and setup is way faster once you've cut the links right. just make sure your feedline is good — i've seen people bring great antennas and then use RG-58 with sketchy connectors and wonder why their signal reports are bad.

we ran almost the exact same setup for a simulated emergency exercise last fall, ic-7300 and a 100ah battleborn with a small renogy panel. worked fine but we were lucky it was sunny most of the day. the generator thing — just bring it and don't feel bad running it. nobody at an exercise cares. what killed us wasn't power it was coax — one of our pl-259s developed an intermittent connection sometime mid-morning and we spent like two hours thinking it was an rfi problem from the genny before someone finally just swapped the feedline. so yeah. bring spare coax and connectors, seriously.