so we have a county ARES drill coming up saturday and ive been going back and forth on whether to bring the honda eu2200i or just run off the lifepo4 battery bank i built last spring. the drill is supposed to be about 6 hours of actual operating time, mostly HF on 40 and 80 for nets plus some local 2m coordination, nothing crazy power-wise.

the battery bank is 100ah at 12v with a good victron mppt hooked to a 100w panel but honestly with cloud cover forecast im not confident the panel keeps up. running the ic-7300 at like 50-60w output plus a laptop and a couple other accessories i figure im drawing maybe 15-20 amps steady which starts eating into that 100ah pretty quick if the solar isnt doing much.

generator is reliable but its just more to haul and the noise is annoying at these things, the other guys always complain. thinking maybe i bring both and use the battery as primary with the generator as backup but then whats the point of the battery if i have to babysit two power sources all day. also the antenna situation is still not sorted — was going to throw up an EFHW for 40/80 but the site has some trees so maybe a vertical instead just to keep it simple. anyone done a similar setup and what did you actually end up wishing you had brought

for 6 hours at that draw rate youre probably fine on the battery if you're disciplined about it. 100ah lifepo4 you can realistically pull 80ah before you start worrying so at 15-20A average thats like 4-5 hours worst case but in practice youre not transmitting the whole time so your average duty cycle probably cuts that actual draw way down. i usually figure 30-40% duty cycle on voice nets and my numbers work out way better than the worst case math.

that said i always bring a small generator to drills anyway, not because i need it most of the time but because if something goes sideways you dont want to be the emcomm guy whose radio went dark at hour 4. the eu2200i is quiet enough that its not really a problem if you put it 20-30 feet away and run a good extension. just run it on eco mode and youll barely hear it.

on the antenna — if you have trees work the EFHW, verticals on the ground with limited radials are always a compromise and the EFHW into decent trees will outperform almost anything else you can put up quick in my experience. just bring enough coax to get some separation from your operating position.

yeah the noise thing is real, we had a drill last fall where someones genny was just droning the whole time and it got old fast. but honestly for 6 hours i wouldnt stress it too much just keep the thing away from everyone.

one thing i started doing for portable ops is carrying a watt meter inline all the time so i actually know what im pulling instead of guessing. the 7300 at 50w is way less than at 100w obviously but also depends a lot on your mic gain and how compressed you're running, sometimes people are suprised how much they're actually drawing vs what they thought. might be worth running your setup at home for an hour and just watching the actual numbers before saturday.