so we have this county-level ARES exercise coming up next saturday and ive been going back and forth on whether to bring the honda eu2200i or just run off the 100ah lifepo4 and a couple panels. the exercise is supposed to run about 8 hours and were going to have at minimum a ft-991a running plus a laptop for winlink and maybe a second rig if we get the traffic volume we're expecting.

my math says the 991a at moderate duty cycle maybe 20-25% transmit is probably pulling average 8-10 amps at 13.8v so call it like 110-140 watts average. laptop another 45w or so. that's roughly 155-185 watts continuous-ish over 8 hours which is pushing what i want to pull from a single 100ah battery even with the lifepo4 being more usable than AGM. i have a 200w panel but its a field exercise and i cant guarantee i get a good solar angle all day depending on where they set up our position.

the generator just feels like overkill and its noisy and i hate dealing with fuel at a community center parking lot type of environment. but i also dont want to be the guy whose station goes dark at hour six because he was too proud to bring the genny. anyone run similar setups in the field, curious what your actual experience is with runtime on battery-only for a full day exercise like this

ran almost exactly that scenario last fall during our SET. had a 100ah dakota lithium and a 160w renogy panel. got maybe 5 hours decent sun and it was actually fine, but we had a really good site with southern exposure and I was babysitting the charge controller readout the whole time. the moment you lose that solar input you're just eating the battery. if theres any doubt about the site i'd honestly just throw the eu2200i in the truck and only run it if you need it. you dont have to have it running the whole time, just have it as the backup. half hour of generator time at the end of the day beats explaining to net control why your gateway is down

also on the antenna side, what are you running? we had issues with the buddipole taking forever to set up and tune in the field, switched to a trap vertical and its so much faster even if the performance isnt quite as good on every band

your consumption numbers are a little optimistic imo. the 991a in certain configs especially if someone cranks the fan or you're doing any digital at higher power levels can spike pretty good. i'd add at least 15-20% margin to whatever you calculate and then add more for stuff you forgot to account for like the charge controller itself, any lighting if it runs late, phone charging, whatever. people always underestimate the parasitic loads at a field setup.

that said 100ah lifepo4 you can realistically pull 80-85ah out of it without stressing it so if your numbers are right you're probably okay but its close. i'd bring the genny. parking lots usually dont care as much about noise as you'd think and the eu2200i is quiet enough that its really not a big deal. run it for an hour mid-day to top up and then you're golden for the rest of the exercise without anxiety