so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up and embarrass myself in front of the EC. last time i ran everything off a 100ah lifepo4 and it was fine for a few hours but we ended up going like 8 hours and i was babysitting the voltage the whole second half of the day which is not great when youre supposed to be handling traffic.

the exercise this time is going to involve running a net control station so probably more continuous TX duty cycle than i usually deal with. im running an IC-7300 and a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig, plus a laptop. rough math says maybe 30-35ah if i keep the HF rig at like 50 watts most of the time, but that assumes a lot and i know it.

a few guys in the group are pushing for a small honda generator as backup but my concern is the noise — RF and otherwise. ive heard the eu2200i is pretty clean but i also dont want to be that guy running a generator 10 feet from the antenna. anyone dealt with this in a real field deployment? also on the antenna side im probably going to throw up a linked dipole for HF and maybe a jpole for the 2m stuff but im open to suggestions if theres something that sets up faster without sacrificing too much.

the eu2200i is genuinely pretty clean for what it is, we've run HF off one during a few go-kit deployments and never had serious issues as long as you keep it at least 30 feet away and bond the frame. use a good ferrite choke on the output cord and youre mostly fine. that said if you're net control and running 8+ hours i'd honestly just bring both — the battery for primary and the generator as a trickle charger, not direct to the radio. that way you're not dealing with whatever noise the inverter puts out getting into the rig.

on the antenna question the linked dipole is solid and hard to beat for quick setup time vs performance. only thing i'd add is make sure your feedline situation is thought out ahead of time, i've watched guys spend 45 minutes messing with coax when the antenna itself took 10 minutes. if you have a good feedline run with a 1:1 choke balun already made up it goes up fast.

yeah the generator noise thing is real but people overstate it sometimes. biggest issue i've seen isnt RF noise from the generator itself, its ground loops when someone ties the generator ground into the station ground improperly. kept an eye on a deployment last summer where a guy had 30 over S9 noise that turned out to be exactly that, unplugged the generator bonding wire and it dropped like 20db. anyway your math on the power consumption sounds about right, maybe a little optimistic depending on how much recieve time you actually get vs transmit. 100ah lifepo4 should be fine for a half day easily if youre not running the laptop off it too. laptop draw is sneaky, worth putting a meter on it.