so we've got a countywide ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with putting together a portable field station at the EOC backup site which is basically a parking lot with a picnic shelter and zero shore power. been doing this for a few years but this time they want us to run for a full 8 hours continuous which is longer than i usually plan for.

my normal setup is a honda eu2200i paired with a 100ah lifepo4 battery as a buffer, running an ic-7300 and a buddipole for hf plus a dual band vertical for local stuff. usually works fine for 3-4 hour exercises but honestly i've never stress tested it for a full day. my concern is mostly the generator runtime and fuel — the eu2200i is rated for like 4-8 hours depending on load and i dont want to be making fuel runs mid-exercise.

thinking about either bringing a second jerry can of fuel or borrowing our EC's eu3000 which would obviously have more headroom but that thing is heavy and a pain to haul. also considering whether i should just lean harder on the battery and only run the genny to recharge it periodically rather than running it constant.

for the antenna side i'm probably doing the buddipole as a sloper off the shelter roof, maybe 25-30 feet at the high end. not ideal but it's what i've got. anyone run similar setups for extended ops and have thoughts on the generator strategy specifically?

the intermittent charging approach is actually what a lot of serious emcomm guys do and it makes a lot of sense. a 100ah lifepo4 at say 80% usable is 80ah, and your 7300 on typical emcomm traffic is probably pulling 15-20w average which is maybe 1.5-2a at 12v. so you've got way more runtime on the battery alone than you might think before you even need the genny. run the radio off the battery, kick the generator on for an hour or two when the battery drops to 50% or so, rinse repeat. your fuel consumption drops dramatically compared to running it continuously and the genny will thank you for the lighter duty cycle too.

the buddipole sloper off the shelter should work fine for regional nets, just watch your feedline routing because if the coax runs near the metal shelter frame you can get some pattern weirdness. i usually try to keep at least a few feet of separation but honestly at those freqs it's probably not catastrophic.

yeah i'd just bring the extra fuel can honestly. the eu2200i is such a good little genny that i'd rather run it than mess around with timing the battery cycles during an actual exercise when you've got other stuff to worry about. nothing worse than managing power state when you're supposed to be handling message traffic.

one thing i'll throw out there — if the exercise has any kind of realistic scenario where you might need to go totally silent on RF noise, the eu2200i is already pretty clean but some gennys absolutely trash the bands. worth doing a quick noise check before the exercise starts, just tune around with the preamp off and see if anything lights up when you fire it up.