so we have a county ARES drill coming up in about 3 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation for our portable station. we're setting up at a fairgrounds with no shore power and need to run probably 6-8 hours continuous, maybe longer if things go sideways like they always seem to during these exercises.

current plan is an IC-7300 on HF and a couple VX-6Rs for local coordination, plus a raspberry pi running js8call for digital fallback. been running off a 100ah lifepo4 with a 30a dc-dc charger off a truck but last time we had issues with the alternator load when the truck was idling for that long. not a great solution.

someone in our group wants to bring a honda eu2200i which honestly seems like overkill to me but i havent done the math. my concern is the noise — we're going to be in a field with like 4 other stations and a 2200 watt generator running is going to bleed into everything. even with the inverter-type generators the rf hash can be a problem depending on grounding.

also still debating antennas. was thinking a linked dipole up maybe 25 feet on a mast but the site coordinator says we might be limited on space so a vertical might make more sense. any of you run endfeds for this kind of thing? the setup time vs performance tradeoff is real when you're trying to get on air fast.

anyway just curious what setups have worked for people doing similar stuff, especially the power side.

the eu2200i is actually not bad rf-wise in my experience, ran one at field day a couple years ago and with decent grounding and a line filter on the output it was pretty clean. the bigger issue is like you said the idle noise for 6+ hours, fuel consumption isnt terrible but its still another thing to manage.

honestly for an ic-7300 running at reasonable power levels your lifepo4 should be fine if you're not going full 100w the whole time. at 25-30w average you're probably pulling 8-10 amps depending on duty cycle, so 100ah gets you a long day easy. the truck alternator issue is real though, long term idling is rough on them and the voltage regulation isnt always consistent which can cause weirdness with some rigs.

for the antenna, ive had really good luck with a 49:1 unun endfed for quick setups. yeah the purists will say the radiation pattern isnt as clean as a center-fed dipole but for emcomm you mostly care about getting on air reliably and fast. 30 feet of wire up 20 feet gets you usable on most bands 40-10. just make sure you have a decent counterpoise sorted out or you'll have rf on the coax and chassis which is a headache.

we had almost the exact same debate before our last activation. ended up going with two 50ah lithium batteries in parallel instead of the generator and honestly it was the right call for the noise situation. ran about 9 hours on hf at mixed power levels without any issues and didnt have to deal with fuel or the noise complaints from the other group. only downside is recharging overnight if the drill extends but we had a 200w panel as backup which helped.

the vertical vs dipole thing really depends on your propagation goals tbh. verticals are great if you need dx or dont have the real estate but if your traffic is regional a dipole up even 20 feet will outperform it on 40m for most paths. linked dipoles are kind of annoying to adjust when you're busy but the performance is hard to argue with.