so we've got a county-level exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the main field comms position. we're talking a full go-kit deployment, probably 6-8 hours of operation, mix of HF and VHF/UHF, and the site we're using has zero shore power. i've done smaller stuff before but nothing this sustained.

my current thinking is to bring the Honda eu2200i and run everything off that with a battery float in parallel — basically keep a 100ah LiFePO4 topped off the whole time so if the genny craps out we dont lose comms. the radio load should be pretty manageable, running an IC-7300 on HF and a couple of 2m/70cm mobiles for the local nets, maybe 50-60 watts average with reasonable duty cycle.

the antenna situation is where im still going back and forth. i was going to bring the SOTAbeams linked dipole for HF since it sets up fast and i can tune it for 40 and 80 without the analyzer, but the club also has an NVIS fan dipole specifically for the kind of short-skip distances we'd be working. the NVIS one is heavier and more of a pain to get up but honestly probably more appropriate for the actual mission. dont know if the extra setup time is worth it for a one-day exercise vs just throwing up something quick and having more time to actually operate.

anyone dealt with similar tradeoffs? specifically curious about the generator/battery combo and whether the parallel float approach actually works as clean as i think it will in practice.

the eu2200i parallel float setup works fine but watch your grounding situation when you do it. i ran almost the exact same config at a RACES exercise a couple years back and picked up a ton of noise on 40m that turned out to be the inverter generator interacting with the battery charger — both were technically fine individually but together they were doing something ugly. ended up moving the charger about 15 feet away from the radio table and running a longer DC cable and it cleaned right up. not saying you'll have the same issue but worth having that in your back pocket.

on the antenna question, just bring the NVIS fan dipole. i know it's more work but if you're doing any kind of realistic served-agency sim you want the antenna thats actually right for the propagation, not the one thats easiest to throw up. nothing worse than spending 6 hours demonstrating to your partners that you can almost make contacts. the extra 20-30 minutes of setup time is nothing over an 8 hour exercise.

yeah what he said about the noise, inverter gens are generally pretty clean but chargers can be a wildcard. i'd also make sure your genny is downwind of the operating position if you can manage it, exhaust smell gets old real fast and depending on how warm it is you'll be miserable by hour 3.

one thing i'll add — have you thought about where the 7300 is sitting relative to the battery? i fried a DC connector once running too long of a thin cable from a 100ah and the voltage drop under transmit was enough to make the radio do weird things. probably obvious but worth double checking your wire gauge for whatever run length you end up with.