so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before then. last year we ran off a honda eu2200i and it was fine but a couple guys complained about the noise during net check-ins and honestly theyre not wrong, trying to copy weak signals while that thing is chugging away 10 feet behind you is annoying even with the inverter being pretty quiet as far as generators go.

thinking about going full battery this time, ive got two 100ah lifepo4 batteries from battleborn that i use for camping and they hold up really well. the main station would be running an IC-7300 plus a signalink for digital, maybe 100w on SSB during busy periods but mostly 50w or less. my rough math says i could run most of the day on one battery with smart power management but id feel better with both wired in parallel just in case the exercise runs long or someone wants to fire up a second rig.

antenna wise i was planning on putting up a linked dipole — the one i built last fall for 40/80 — on a 31ft spiderbeam pole. worked fine in the backyard but ive never deployed it under actual field conditions with wind and people walking around. anyone have opinions on whether a non-resonant EFHW with a 9:1 unun might be faster to deploy even if its not quite as clean? i can tune through the 7300's internal tuner on most bands but 80 seems finicky sometimes.

anyway mostly asking about the generator vs battery tradeoff and whether anyone has done a full day exercise on lifepo4 alone without running out. the exercise is supposed to be 0800 to 1800 local so roughly 10 hours.

done this exact thing a few times for our ARES group and honestly once you go lifepo4 for field work you dont really go back to dragging a genny unless you genuinely need the runtime or youre running something power hungry like a linear. two 100ah battleborns in parallel for a 7300 at 50-100w is totally workable for 10 hours, especially if youre not transmitting constantly. figure maybe 20-25% duty cycle on a nets-and-traffic kind of exercise and youre probably drawing somewhere around 5-8 amps average. do the math and youre fine.

the thing people forget is keeping an eye on it. bring a good battery monitor, not just the voltage readout on the radio. i use a victron smartshunt and it actually tells me amp-hours consumed which is way more useful than guessing from voltage. lifepo4 voltage curves are flat enough that by the time the voltage starts dropping noticeably youre already in trouble.

on the antenna question — i have a similar linked dipole and yeah the efhw is definitely faster to throw up but the tuner situation on 80 is real. some 9:1 ununs are better than others and the 7300's tuner doesnt have unlimited range. if youre primary net frequency is 80m id stick with the linked dipole honestly, just practice the deployment a couple times before the exercise so it becomes muscle memory.

we ran a 12 hour exercise last summer entirely on a 200ah lifepo4 bank (two 100ah in parallel, similar to what you described) powering an ft-991a and a laptop running flmsg and it was totally fine, had like 40% left at the end. granted we werent running 100w much but still.

one thing i'd add — if youre going to skip the generator entirely bring some way to recharge mid-exercise just in case. even a decent solar panel strapped to the roof of your go-kit vehicle can put a few amps back in during a long day. i carry a 100w panel and a victron mppt controller in the truck now just as a backstop, not really expecting to need it but its there. adds maybe 15 minutes to setup.

also on the spiderbeam pole in wind — had one get a little sketchy on us when a storm front came through during a field day type event. not catastrophic but the base stake pulled and we had to guy it better. if theres any chance of afternoon thunderstorms in your area id have a plan for that. we started driving a longer stake and running three guylines about 2/3 up the pole and havent had problems since.