so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about 3 weeks and im trying to finalize the power setup for the portable station. we're running an IC-7300 as the primary HF rig plus a couple VHF portables for local nets, and the question thats been going back and forth in our group is whether to bring a generator or just rely on a battery bank with solar backup.

last time we did one of these i ran a 100ah AGM with a 100w panel and it was fine for like 6 hours but we ended up running the radio way more than expected once things picked up and i had to throttle down the 7300 to like 50w to stretch the charge. the exercise this time is supposed to go 18 hours which is a different beast entirely.

the generator option would be a harbor freight 2200w inverter genny, one of the guys has one. clean enough power supposedly for radio use but i've heard mixed things and i dont really want to deal with RFI if it starts bleeding into the receive on 40 or 80m. anyone actually used one of those with an HF rig or should i just stack more batteries and maybe add another panel. also trying to keep things portable since we're setting up in a parking lot but might have to hump gear a short distance to the actual operating position.

antenna wise we're probably going with a linked dipole up on a 31ft jackite and maybe a vertical as a backup. nothing exotic just want reliable.

the HF2200 type inverter gennys are generally pretty decent for radio work, i ran one behind my go-kit table at a public service event last summer with an FT-991A and honestly the noise floor was fine. key thing is keep the generator physically as far from the antenna and the rig as you can manage, like at least 30-40 feet of separation, and run a good quality extension cord. also bond the generator frame to your station ground, some guys skip that and then wonder why theyre hearing hash on 40.

that said for 18 hours at moderate power levels i'd probably go hybrid — run the genny in bursts to top off a battery bank and operate off the battery directly. you get cleaner receive and you're not burning fuel the whole time. two 100ah AGMs in parallel plus your solar should be solid with that kind of recharge strategy. the jackite and linked dipole combo sounds like the right call, keep it simple for an exercise.

yeah what he said about the grounding is real, learned that the hard way. also worth throwing a ferrite clamp or two on the DC power leads going into the rig if you do run off the genny output — sometimes there's common mode junk even when the AC looks clean on a meter. i use a cheap kill-a-watt to check the genny output voltage before i plug anything sensitive in, probably overkill but it only takes a second.

one thing i'll add — the 31ft jackite is great but in a parking lot situation if there's any wind at all that thing becomes a handful without good guying. had mine do a slow-motion fall onto a car hood once, nobody was happy about it. bring extra stakes and some paracord, seriously.