so we have a fairly big county-wide ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with putting together a portable field station that needs to run for about 18 hours straight, possibly outdoors with no shore power. been going back and forth on whether to bring the Honda EU2200i or just go all-in on LiFePO4 batteries and skip the generator noise headache entirely.

the planned load is an IC-7300 running at maybe 50-60w most of the time, a SignaLink for digital, laptop, and a few accessories. i did a rough estimate and i'm looking at somewhere around 15-20ah per hour depending on duty cycle which honestly seems like a lot when i write it out. for antennas i'm leaning toward the Chameleon MPAS 2.0 on a push-up mast since i can get it up fast and work basically any band, but part of me wants to just throw up a resonant dipole for 40m since that's what we'll be using 90% of the time for the nets.

anyone done a long-duration field setup like this and have opinions on the generator vs battery question? i keep going in circles on it.

done this exact kind of exercise a few times now. honestly the generator question comes down to one thing for me — how much do you care about the people standing around you for 18 hours. eu2200i is quiet but its still a generator sitting there, and if you're near other operators or in a residential area for some reason it gets old fast. that said if you're in a park or parking lot setup nobody really cares.

for 18 hours at that load i think you're looking at carrying a LOT of lifepo4 to avoid the genny. maybe 200-250ah worth to feel comfortable with headroom, and thats heavy even in the newer cells. i usually compromise and bring both — smaller 100ah battery pack as primary and the generator on standby if we go past 10-12 hours or start running higher power. works pretty well and the genny barely runs.

on the antenna thing i'd take the resonant 40m dipole over the MPAS if you know thats your primary band. the chameleon is great for quick deployment and flexibility but a tuned dipole is just going to outperform it on that one band, less hassle with the tuner, and one less thing to fiddle with when something goes wrong at 2am during an exercise.

your ah estimate might be a bit high depending on how the actual net operates — if youre mostly listening and only transmitting in short bursts the 7300 at 50w isnt pulling that continuously. worth actually measuring your setup with a watt meter or one of those battery monitors before the exercise so you have real numbers instead of worst case guesses. i was surprised how low my actual consumption was once i measured it properly vs what i calculated on paper.

the MPAS is fine but yeah if 40m is the plan just cut a dipole, seriously takes like 20 minutes and some wire and you'll have zero regrets. i've used the chameleon stuff and its convienient but i always feel like i'm fighting the tuner more than i want to during an actual activation.