so our ARES group is doing a simulated emergency exercise next month and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything for what could be an 8-10 hour deployment. we're running an IC-7300 as the main HF station, a VX-6R on the side for local coordination, and probably a laptop for logging and maybe some winlink traffic.

my current thinking is a honda eu2200i paired with a 100ah lithium battery as a buffer — basically run the genny for a few hours in the morning to top everything off, then run quiet on battery for the afternoon when we're closer to the residential area. noise-wise the honda is pretty tame but still, you know how it goes at these things, someone always complains.

antenna side im probably going to throw up a linked dipole on a 31ft jackite pole, got it tuned pretty well for 40 and 20. might try to get a 15m link in there too if I have time before the exercise. the challenge is the site has some decent trees but ground is really soft from all the rain we got this spring so guying anything vertical is going to be a pain.

anyone done something similar for a full day ARES or RACES deployment where you needed to stay quiet but still have enough juice? curious if the battery buffer approach actually works in practice or if im overcomplicating it.

yeah the battery buffer thing works great, we do basically the same thing for our county EOC exercises. the trick is knowing your actual draw — the 7300 at 100w output is pulling somewhere around 22 amps on transmit but if you're doing typical emcomm traffic patterns with a lot of receive time the average consumption is way lower than that. i logged ours once and we were averaging maybe 8-9 amps over a few hours of actual exercise traffic.

100ah lithium should be more than enough to get you through the quiet periods without the genny running, especially if you're not pegging the finals the whole time. i'd just watch the laptop — those things sneak up on you if you're running wifi and screen brightness cranked. throw it on a separate small AGM or at least account for it, i once drained about 15ah more than expected because of a laptop i kind of forgot to factor in properly.

linked dipole on a jackite is solid choice for that kind of deployment. if the ground is soft i usually just stake two or three tent stakes in a triangle and tie the base of the pole to those, works surprisingly well unless it's truly waterlogged mud. good luck with the exercise.

eu2200i is what i bring too, thing is a workhorse. one thing i'd mention — if you're running the genny to charge the lithium AND power the radio at the same time, make sure whatever charge controller or DC-DC converter you're using doesn't cause any RFI. had a cheap converter a while back that put garbage all over 40m, took me like an hour to figure out what was causing the hash. switched to a better isolated unit and it went away. not saying yours will do that but worth checking on a test run before the actual exercise.