so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i've been trying to figure out the best way to set up a self-contained station that can run for like 8-10 hours without needing to rely on shore power. this is always the thing that bites us during actual activations too so i want to actually nail it this time instead of scrambling

right now im leaning toward running a pair of 100ah lifepo4 batteries in parallel feeding a 30 amp linear supply for the IC-7300, plus a separate smaller pack just for the laptop and logging. the other option ive been kicking around is just bringing a small inverter generator like a honda eu2200 and calling it done, but theres the noise issue and fuel logistics and honestly nobody wants to babysit a generator all day

for antennas we have a buddipole and also a end-fed halfwave on a 31ft fiberglass pole, the efhw has been way more reliable in my experience especially when youre not sure whats under you. thinking about using that on 40m as the primary workhorse and maybe the buddipole configured for 2m if we need local tactical stuff

anybody run a similar setup and have thoughts on whether the battery approach actually holds up for that kind of runtime? im especially curious if anyone has had issues with voltage sag on lifepo4 under transmit loads, the 7300 can pull around 20-22 amps on high power and i dont want to be doing the math wrong here

the lifepo4 route is definitely the way to go for that kind of deployment honestly. ive been running a 100ah battleborn for two years now at field day and various SOTA activations and the voltage sag under load is pretty much a non-issue compared to SLA, like it stays up around 13.1-13.2v even when you're pushing it hard. two of them in parallel you should be fine for 8-10 hours running maybe 50-60% duty cycle on the 7300, i wouldnt run full 100w the whole time anyway in a comms exercise setting

one thing i would say is make sure your parallel connection setup is done right, equal length cables from each battery to the bus bar or you end up with uneven draw and one battery doing most of the work. learned that the annnoying way at a deployment last spring

the efhw on the 31 footer is a solid choice for 40m, we use almost the exact same setup and it just works. only thing i'd throw out there is if you haven't tuned it at the actual site before, give yourself extra time because ground conditions can shift the resonant point enough to matter if you're trying to run without a tuner

dont sleep on having the generator as a backup even if you go battery primary. i know the noise is annoying and yes fuel is a pain but ive been burned twice at actual emergency activations where something unexpected extended the op time way past what we planned and a dead battery stack in hour 11 of a 14 hour activation is not a fun situation. even just having the eu2200 in the truck as a fallback charges the batts while you run off them and you never have to actually start it if things go well

also on the antenna question -- efhw all day for this kind of thing. buddipole is great when you need the flexibility but setup time matters in a real deployment and the efhw on a push up pole is just faster to get in the air. we actually retired our buddipole for most field work for exactly that reason