so we've got a county ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable HF/VHF station that can run for roughly 18 hours without resupply. this is basically a standalone comms node at a remote site, no shore power, maybe a picnic shelter if we're lucky.

my current thinking is running an IC-7300 for HF and a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig for local nets. the HF antenna situation is what's killing me — we've got a site with decent tree coverage so i was thinking a linked dipole hung as an inverted V, maybe covering 80/40/20. the 2m side would just be a roll-up J-pole or maybe the slim jim i've got sitting in a drawer somewhere.

the power question is where i keep going back and forth. i've run a honda eu2200i before and it's quiet enough that you can actually have a conversation next to it. but lugging that thing plus fuel out to a remote site is a pain, and the logistics of fuel resupply over 18 hours is its own headache. the other option is going heavy on lifepo4 — i've got a 100ah battle born and was thinking of adding a second one. at the draw these rigs put out i think i can make it work but havent fully done the math yet.

anyone done something similar for a longer deployment? curious what bit you in the backside when you actually got to the field versus what you planned at home.

yeah we did almost exactly this for a simulated emergency exercise last spring. went the battery route with two 100ah lifepo4 packs and a 200w solar panel as a trickle keep-alive. the math works out better than you'd think — 7300 on receive is maybe 2 amps, tx on a typical net checkin cycle you're not keying up that often so average draw stays pretty reasonable. we ran about 14 hours without sweating it too bad and the panel was putting in maybe 6-8 amps during the day which helped a lot.

the antenna situation though, that's where we had problems. we brought a linked dipole like you're describing and the trees at the actual site were not where we thought they'd be based on the satellite view. ended up having to reconfigure it as more of a flat top with one end lower than we wanted. works fine but took like 45 minutes to sort out when we were also trying to set up everything else at once. i'd strongly suggest doing a site survey ahead of time if you can get out there, even just to walk the ground and look at where you can actually throw rope.

the genny vs battery thing really comes down to whether you need to run high power consistently. if you're mostly doing net check-ins and passing traffic at 100w or less, battery is totally doable and way less hassle. if someone wants to run digital modes or you end up needing to push power for marginal propagation, having the honda as a backup charging option isn't a bad idea even if you don't plan to run it much.

dont sleep on the slim jim over the roll-up jpole for 2m, ive found it works noticeably better when youre trying to get into a repeater that isnt quite line of sight. minor thing but in a real deployment those little margins matter.

for 18 hours on lifepo4 just make sure your second battery is actually the same cell chemistry and not a different brand that claims lifepo4 but isnt spec'd the same way. had a weird situation where two supposedly compatible packs werent playing nice with a shared charge controller and one was always running lower than the other. probably a BMS thing but it was annoying to diagnose in the field.