so we've got a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the primary field communications station. ive done portable ops before but nothing this formal where people are actually counting on the gear to work reliably for like 8-10 hours straight.

my current plan is running my IC-7300 off a Honda eu2200i with a 50ft run of extension cord to keep the generator noise away from the antenna area. been testing this at home and the RFI from the generator is manageable on HF as long as its at least 30ft away, though i still get some hash on 40m if the loading is light. anyone dealt with this — is it a grounding thing or just the nature of these inverter gennies?

for antennas i'm thinking either my buddipole or just throwing up an EFHW with a 9:1 unun against a few radials. the site is a county park with decent tree cover so i should be able to get the wire up reasonably high. the buddipole is faster to deploy but the EFHW tends to just work better once its up, at least in my experience.

also debating whether to bring the LiFePO4 battery as a backup or primary and run the generator as backup. battery is a 100ah bioenno and theoretically i could run the radio at 50-60% power for most of the day without touching the generator at all. but if something goes wrong with the battery mid-exercise that's a problem. what would you guys do for the power setup?

the RFI from inverter generators is almost always a grounding issue in my experience. what i do is run a separate ground rod right at the generator and bond the frame with a short piece of #10 wire, then make sure the radio end is also grounded independently. the two grounds kind of fight each other in a good way and kill most of the common mode noise. also a common mode choke on the power lead from the generator helps a lot — i wound about 8 turns of the extension cord through a mix31 toroid and that cleaned things up considerably on 40 and 80.

on the power question i'd run the battery as primary and keep the generator staged but not running. you burn less fuel, its quieter for voice comms, and the bioenno at 100ah will carry you through most of the day at reasonable power levels. just make sure you have a way to top off the battery from the generator if you need to — a decent dc-dc charger or even just a battery tender running off the ac output. that way if the battery drops below like 20% you spin up the generator and recover while still operating.

EFHW over the buddipole for a fixed site exercise, no question. takes longer to set up but performance difference is noticeable especially on 40m.

yeah the eu2200i is pretty clean as generators go but light loading is definitely when they get noisier — the inverter section seems to generate more garbage when its only pulling like 200-300w. running a small dummy load in parallel can help stabilize it, sounds dumb but it works. some guys use a cheap space heater on low just to keep the loading up.

one thing i'd add is dont overlook your feedline routing relative to the generator. even 30ft separation doesnt help much if the coax is running parallel to the power cord for any length. try to cross them at 90 degrees or keep significant physical distance. picked that up the hard way at a field day a few years back, spent an hour chasing noise that turned out to be coupling between the coax and the generator extension cord that were bundled together for about 20ft.