so we have a county-level exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before then. last time we ran a generator the whole time and it was honestly more trouble than it was worth — noise on the rx was terrible, had to keep moving the thing to get away from the exhaust, and somebody let it run dry which killed it mid-op. not a great look.

this time i'm leaning toward lithium battery bank for the primary station with a small genny as backup only. running an IC-7300 as the main rig, probably 50-60w output to keep consumption reasonable. i've been looking at the bioenno 50ah lifepo4 and at that draw rate it should get me most of a full day without needing to touch the generator at all. antenna-wise i'm thinking the linked dipole i built last year plus maybe a vertical if we need to work more than one band simultaneously.

anybody done something similar for an actual deployment not just a SOTA trip or whatever? the main thing im not sure about is whether the 7300's receive current draw is gonna eat into that 50ah more than i'm calculating. also curious if people run their antennas off portable masts or if you just find a tree and throw a line over it. trees arent always available at the sites we end up at.

the 7300 idles around 1.5-2A on receive depending on display brightness and what you have running. if your tx duty cycle is reasonable for emcomm work (which it usually is, you're not contesting) then 50ah should absolutely cover a full 8 hour op day with room to spare. i'd derate to maybe 80% usable on the lifepo4 just to be safe so call it 40ah effective — you'll be fine.

on the mast question, i've been using a 33ft jackite pole for the past couple years and it's been really solid. stakes into the ground well enough with the right guying setup and you can get a wire antenna up fast. throw a linked dipole off the top in an inverted-v config and you're covering most HF bands in maybe 20 minutes once you've done it a few times. dont bother with a tuner if you build the links right for your target bands, one less thing to power and mess with.

the generator-as-backup-only approach is the right call imo. run it only when you need to top off the battery and keep it well away from the op position. get a long enough extension cord that you can really isolate it, i run about 50 feet and that plus ferrites on the power lead basically killed the rfi for me.

yeah trees are definitely not a given at the kinds of parking lots and fairgrounds they always seem to pick for these things. i carry two of those surplus military mast sections — the fiberglass push-up kind — and they nest together to get me around 20-25 feet which is enough for a vertical or the apex of a low dipole. not glamorous but it packs into a duffel and i can set it up solo.

one thing i'll throw out there, and maybe this is obvious, but make sure whoever is on the genny backup duty actually knows how to start it and check the oil before the exercise. sounds dumb but that run-it-dry thing you mentioned is way more common than it should be. we had the same thing happen at a simulated emergency last spring. the generator came back fine after it cooled down thankfully but it was a stressful 45 minutes.