so we've got a served agency exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been going back and forth on power for the whole weekend. its a 48 hour deployment and i'm running an IC-7300, a laptop for winlink, and probably a small fan because its going to be hot in that trailer. my usual go-to is a pair of 100ah LiFePO4 batteries with a 200w solar panel but honestly this time of year the cloud cover around here has been terrible and i cant count on solar to keep up.

the other option is borrowing a honda eu2200i from one of the club guys. i've used it before and it's quiet enough, inverter type so the 7300 doesn't freak out on it, but then i'm dealing with fuel, exhaust routing out of the trailer, carbon monoxide concerns, the whole thing. last time we ran a generator at one of these i spent half the night worrying about CO instead of actually operating.

anyone else dealt with this kind of setup for a multi-day emcomm event? thinking maybe a hybrid approach, run the genny a few hours to top off the batteries and then run off batteries the rest of the time. or is that overcomplicating it. the antenna situation is figured out, running a linked dipole off a 31ft spiderpole so thats not the issue here, just the power side is making me second guess everything two weeks out

the hybrid approach is honestly what most of us settled on after a few of these longer deployments. run the generator for maybe 3-4 hours in the morning to top everything off, shut it down, run off battery the rest of the day. a good LiFePO4 bank with that load you're describing should get you 10-12 hours easy if you're not transmitting 100% duty cycle the whole time which you wont be. the CO thing is real though, don't dismiss it. had a guy at a county exercise a few years back who got a headache from exhaust seeping under the trailer door, turned out the genny was upwind and it was just barely drifting in. get a CO detector in that trailer regardless, like a cheap camper one, costs nothing and you'll sleep better. also on the eu2200i, that thing is rock solid for RF gear, i've run a 7300 off one for hours with no issues at all. just keep the fuel situation sorted and you'll be fine

yeah CO in a trailer is no joke, dont skip that part. one thing i'd add - if your solar panel is just not cutting it because of clouds, have you looked at adding even a small second panel? like a cheap 100w folding panel could be the difference. not as a replacement for the genny plan but just to take some load off. i run my portable station off two 100ah lithiums and a 300w of panels and for a 48hr thing as long as im not running digital modes at full blast all day it mostly keeps up even with mediocre sun. but your load sounds heavier than mine with the laptop and fan factored in. anyway the hybrid thing makes sense, thats what i'd do