so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up saturday and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up with half my gear and realize ive forgotten something critical again. last time i ran off a 100ah lifepo4 and it lasted fine for the 6 hour window we had but this one is supposed to go 18-20 hours and i dont want to babysit battery voltage the whole time.

thinking about bringing my little honda eu2200i alongside the battery so i can keep the pack topped off without running the genny the whole time. the question is whether its worth the hassle of a proper charge controller in between or if i just run the genny output through a decent power supply straight to the battery. ive seen people do both and get weird answers when i ask at club meetings.

antenna side is pretty sorted — going up a 40m inverted vee off a 33ft jackite pole, got the coax run figured out, and for vhf i have a small yagi i can throw on a camera tripod for the point to point stuff. the site has decent tree cover so ground anchoring shouldnt be a bad time.

main thing bugging me is the generator noise on HF. last field day i was running SSB on 40 and the eu2200i sitting maybe 20 feet away was putting a faint hash on the waterfall. not terrible but annoying. anyone dealt with that specifically with the honda inverter gens, curious if distance is the main fix or if there's something else going on there.

the generator noise thing is almost always coming in through the power line not radiated — at least in my experience with inverter gens. i had the same issue with a yamaha ef2000is and adding a common mode choke on the DC feed between the power supply and the radio killed like 90% of it. just wound the coax or DC cable through a big mix31 toroid a few turns and that was basically that. also worth making sure your power supply ground and your antenna system ground are actually bonded together, that caught me out for way longer than i want to admit.

on the charge question — running the EU2200 through a quality power supply into the lifepo4 is fine but watch what voltage the supply is putting out. a lot of the cheap 13.8v supplies wont fully charge a lifepo4 since those like to see more like 14.4-14.6v to hit full capacity. if you have a proper lifepo4 charger just use that off the AC side of the genny and keep the radio running off the battery, simpler and the radio never sees genny noise at all.

we do a lot of these longer activations for our ARES group and honestly the thing that helped us most was just getting the generator physically farther away than feels necessary. like 20 feet sounds fine but 50 feet with a longer extension cord made a bigger difference than any ferrite i tried. terrain helps too if theres any kind of berm or even your vehicle between the gen and the antenna feedpoint.

your inverted vee on the jackite setup sounds solid for 40, thats basically what we run. one thing i'll mention — if the exercise goes overnight and temps drop make sure your feedline connectors are not the ones with that plasticky center insulator that gets loose when it cools down, had a connection go intermittent at like 2am once and spent an embarassing amount of time troubleshooting the radio before i found it.