so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im helping put together the communications node at the EOC annex site which is basically a parking lot with a building we can use for maybe half of the team, rest will be outside under canopies. been doing this for a few years but this is the first time im actually in charge of the power side of things and i have some questions.

we're planning to run two HF stations, probably an IC-7300 and someone's 706, plus a couple VHF/UHF rigs, a laptop for winlink, and some battery charging. the organizer wants us to be off grid for the full 12 hour exercise. i've been looking at a honda eu2200i for the main genny and then using a couple 100ah lifepo4 batteries as a buffer so the radios dont see the generator noise directly. does that make sense as an approach or am i overcomplicating it?

also the antenna situation — we have a decent collection of stuff but the site has almost no vertical clearance, like there's a parking structure nearby and some trees but nothing over maybe 40 feet that we can actually use. someone suggested just putting up a fan dipole on a 33ft fiberglass mast but i dont know if thats gonna work well for 40 and 80 which is what we actually need for the exercise comms. anyone dealt with similar site constraints?

the generator/battery buffer idea is actually pretty solid and not overkill at all. running the radios directly off a cheapo genny is asking for noise problems, especially on receive. the eu2200i is a good choice, inverter generators are way cleaner than the open frame stuff and i've had good luck running an ic-7300 off one with no issues but putting the lifepo4 in between is still smart because then the genny can run at lower load and recharge the bank while the radios draw from the batteries. just watch your charge controller setup and make sure everythign is fused properly at the battery terminals.

for the antenna question, 33ft mast with a fan dipole is workable but youre going to have some compromises. on 80m especially a dipole that low is going to be more of a cloud warmer than anything, fine for short skip but if your exercise has stations more than like 150 miles out you might struggle a bit. 40m should be okay at that height for regional comms. if you can get the center up 33ft and the ends dropped down in an inverted V config that usually helps. also worth having an NVIS setup in mind if short range 80m is part of the plan, low dipoles actually work in your favor for that.

yeah what he said about the inverted V, that's basically what we do for every deployment. honestly for a 12 hour exercise the bigger headache in my experience isnt the antenna its keeping everyone's equipment from draining the battery bank faster than you planned. someone always shows up with a laptop that hasnt been charged and a phone they want to run off the system and suddenly your load calculations are out the window.

id put a clamp meter on the whole system early in the exercise just to see what your actual draw is vs what you estimated. also the eu2200i is fine but bring an extra 5 gallons of gas minimum, those things are efficient but 12 hours is 12 hours and youll probably run it more than you think.