so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before we get there. last time we ran this kind of thing a couple guys showed up with generators and honestly it was kind of a mess — noise on the HF bands, interference everywhere, one guy's cheap inverter generator was just killing the 40m net we were trying to run.

my current thinking is to go full battery for at least the first 12 hours and only bring the generator as a backup charger overnight if needed. i've got a 100ah lifepo4 that runs my IC-7300 pretty comfortably in the field, running like 50-60w which keeps me well under the discharge ceiling. but the exercise is supposed to be 18-20 hours and i honestly dont know if i can stretch that without a recharge somewhere in the middle.

on the antenna side i'm planning to bring my linked dipole and set it up as an inverted V off a 31ft jackite pole. works fine for 40/20/15 and honestly thats probably all we'll need for this exercise. my question is more about whether anyone has found a good way to run a small generator far enough away from the operating position that you're not picking up all that RFI but still close enough to run a charge cable. like what's the actual minimum distance where it stops being a problem in your experience

the generator distance thing really depends on the generator and your antenna situation more than anything else. ive run a honda eu2200i probably 60 feet away from an operating position and had basically zero issues, but a buddy ran a cheaper predator unit and we had garbage on 40 even at 100 feet. the quality of the inverter circuit matters a lot. if you have a true sine wave inverter generator and you also run a decent ferrite choke on the charging cable right at the entry point to your operating position, you can usually get away with shorter distances than you'd think.

for your runtime question — 100ah lifepo4 at 50-60w out of the radio, dont forget to account for the radio's actual draw at that output which is usually more like 15-18A on transmit at 50w depending on the rig, plus receive current plus whatever accessories you've got running. if you're doing maybe 20-25% duty cycle on transmit which is typical for a net control kind of role you're probably looking at an average draw somewhere around 6-8A. that stretches your 100ah pretty far if you keep the math honest. you might actually be fine without the generator at all depending on how chatty the exercise gets.

yeah the linked dipole on a jackite is a solid choice for that kind of deployment, ive used almost the exact same setup and it just works. one thing i'd throw out there — if you're doing inverted V off a single 31ft pole and you're near any other operators also running wire antennas, watch your apex height vs their setup or you can end up with some weird coupling issues, had that happen at a simulated emergency test a few years back where two stations were maybe 40 feet apart both running inverted Vs and they were just walking all over each other even on different bands. not saying itll happen but worth thinking about spacing if other folks are bringing similar gear.