so we've got a countywide exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before we actually show up and embarrass ourselves. last time we ran off a honda eu2200i and it was fine but a couple of the other operators are pushing hard for going all lithium this time and i'm kind of on the fence about it.

the setup is going to be two HF stations running IC-7300s probably, one VHF/UHF station for local nets, and we're also trying to run a winlink gateway off a raspberry pi. so not a crazy amount of draw but its not nothing either. my rough math says we could be looking at 30-40 amp hours over an 8 hour op period if we're being conservative with the HF rigs at maybe half power most of the time.

antenna wise we're probably doing a couple of linked dipoles for the 40/80 work and somebody mentioned bringing a buddipole for 20 if we need to talk to state EOC. i've used buddipoles before and they work but honestly for a fixed field site i kinda prefer just throwing up a simple wire. less to go wrong.

anyway the real question is — anybody actually run a full exercise day on nothing but lithium batteries and not had problems? we could bring like 3 or 4 100ah lifepo4 packs and theoretically that should be way more than enough but i keep thinking about what happens if something drains faster than expected or we have a cold night. were in the northeast so october temps are a thing.

we did exactly this last fall, two day SET with zero generator. had three 100ah battleborn packs and a 200w solar panel for trickle during the day. ran two ic-7300s and a raspberry pi winlink node pretty much the whole time and never dropped below about 60% on the batteries combined. the trick is you really need to watch your transmit duty cycle — if guys are just ragchewing on ssb all day at 100w you'll burn through it faster than you think, but for actual emcomm traffic handling it was totally fine.

cold was actually less of a problem than i expected with the lifepo4 chemistry, it was mid 40s overnight and we didnt notice any real capacity drop. below freezing might be a different story though so your october concern is probably valid depending on how cold it actually gets. i'd say bring the honda anyway as a backup, just dont run it unless you have to. quiet site is a happy site.

yeah the buddipole vs wire thing is real. i've had buddipoles flop over in wind at the worst possible moment during a drill and it just looks bad. for a semi-permanent field site even a simple inverted v on a 31ft jackite pole is going to outperform it and take like 10 minutes to set up. just my two cents on that part.

on the generator question i honestly dont think you need to choose, run the lifepo4 as your primary and keep the honda staged. if you size the battery bank right youll probably never touch it but it's there. the eu2200i is quiet enough that if you do need to run it it wont kill everyone around you.