so im putting together a portable field comms setup for a county ARES exercise this weekend and im going back and forth on power. ive been running a 100ah lifepo4 with a 40w solar panel for most of my portable work but this exercise is supposed to run 12+ hours and theres a good chance we'll be under tree cover most of the day so solar might be useless.

the question is whether to haul my honda eu2200i or just bring a second battery. the genny is loud and kind of a pain to deal with but obviously it solves the problem. were running an IC-7300 at around 50w most of the time, maybe occasional 100w bursts, plus a laptop and some accessories so call it 25-30A draw averaged out. the math says one battery probably gets me 3-4 hours of real runtime before i'd want to stop pulling it down and a second gets me through the day but thats a lot of weight to haul.

also have to decide on antennas - i have a buddistick and a linked dipole on a 31ft jackite pole. leaning toward the dipole for HF and maybe a vertical whip for VHF/UHF APRS. anyone dealt with similar setups for extended emcomm ops? curious what tradeoffs youve run into with the generator noise and RFI especially

the eu2200i RFI situation really depends on how close you park it to the radio. ive run mine maybe 30-40 feet away with the cable routed away from the coax runs and its been pretty clean on HF, picked up a little hash on 40m once but nothing a notch filter couldnt handle. the inverter generators are way better than the old conventional stuff in that regard. put a line filter on the output anyway just as insurance.

honestly for a 12 hour exercise id just bring the generator. the second battery option sounds nice until youre at hour 8 and everyone wants to run a net and suddenly youre watching the voltage drop. the eu2200i sips fuel at low load, you wont go through more than a gallon or so for the day. and if something goes sideways and the exercise runs long youre just fine. the linked dipole on the jackite is the right call for HF, ive used basically that same setup for years and it just works.

yeah what he said about the generator. one thing i'd add - if youre worried about noise from the eu2200i try running your coax feedline in a big loop away from the generator exhaust side, sometimes its not even RF its just the physical vibration coupling into stuff weirdly. sounds dumb but i spent an hour chasing what i thought was RFI once and it was literally mechanical hum getting into a loose connector.

also for the APRS vertical just make sure you get some separation from your HF antenna or youll get intermod weirdness if both rigs are transmitting anywhere close to simultaneously. probably obvious but i've seen people set up right next to each other and wonder why things act up