so we've got a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down the power setup before we show up and look like idiots. last year we had two different guys show up with incompatible power setups and it was a mess, one guy's inverter was making so much noise it was garbage on 40m the whole afternoon.

my current plan is to run the IC-7300 off a 100ah lifepo4 and skip the generator entirely for the radio side. figure with modest duty cycle on voice and some digi we can run maybe 6-8 hours before we need to worry. but the exercise is supposedly going to run all day and into the evening so im a little nervous about that. plus we need power for the laptop running Winlink and a small fan cause it'll be hot as hell in the tent.

the antenna situation is simpler — i've got a Chameleon MPAS 2.0 that i'm pretty comfortable with and an EFHW on a 31ft fiberglass pole as backup. both have worked fine in past exercises but i've never tried to run them simultaneously for like 10+ hours and im curious if anyone has had issues with the Chameleon taking a beating in sustained heat.

anyone running a similar setup for extended field ops? at what point do you just give in and bring the generator?

the noise issue you mentioned from last year is real and honestly the main reason i switched to pure battery for anything comms-related. even a supposedly "clean" inverter generator will sneak hash onto the bands if your feedline runs anywhere near it. i keep the generator for non-radio loads only now — fans, lights, charging reserve batteries — and just run the rig directly off lifepo4 through an anderson powerpole distribution block.

100ah should be plenty for a 7300 if youre not running 100 watts the whole time. i typically see maybe 18-22 amps peaks on transmit at full power, way less if you drop to 50w which honestly is fine for most exercise comms anyway. with the laptop and fan factored in youre probably looking at maybe 10-12 amp average draw depending on duty cycle. do the math and you should be fine through dinner at least. bring a second battery if you can swing it though, just peace of mind.

chameleon in heat i havent had problems with but i always make sure the base isnt sitting on asphalt or anything that'll radiate heat back at it. grass or dirt and it's been fine for me in july deployments.

yeah honestly if the exercise goes into evening you might want at least a small genny on standby even if you dont plan to use it for the radio. we had a similar thing last summer and around hour nine the laptop battery situation got sketchy and we ended up needing to charge two HTs plus keep the main rig going and it got real tight. a little Honda eu2200 running the chargers only while the radio stays on battery is a pretty clean solution, just keep them physically seperated.

also if your doing winlink for any significant traffic load the laptop pulls more than people expect, especially if it's not a purpose-built low draw machine. worth metering it beforehand if you havent already.