so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up next saturday and im trying to nail down my portable setup. ive done these before but this time theyre asking us to run for 6+ hours off grid which is longer than usual and my usual battery situation probably wont cut it.

right now i have a 40ah lifepo4 that i run my ic-7300 off of and on receive its fine but when im transmitting any real duty cycle that battery gets chewed through faster than id like. been thinking about bringing my honda eu2200i but honestly i hate running a generator at a comm site because of the noise and the RF it throws off, last time i tried it with a different rig i had all kinds of hash on 40m that i couldnt track down.

antenna wise im planning on the buddipole set up as a vertical for 40/80m which is what the net usually runs on during exercises. thinking about 25 feet of mast height. the site is a parking lot next to the EOC so ground conditions are going to be garbage, was going to use a bunch of radials but even that feels like a pain to set up on asphalt.

anyone dealt with the generator RFI thing and actually solved it or do i just need a bigger battery bank

the honda eu2200i is actually one of the cleaner inverter generators out there in terms of RF, the issue youre probably running into is grounding and maybe the way its bonded to your radio chassis. what worked for me was running a dedicated ground rod right at the generator, bonding the frame to it, and also making sure the radio chassis and the coax shield are all on the same ground reference. ferrite chokes on the power leads going into the radio helped a lot too, i use a mix-31 toroid wound about 8 turns, that killed most of the noise i was seeing.

also worth checking if the RFI is actually coming from the generator itself or from switching noise in whatever charge controller or DC-DC converter youre running in between. ive been burned by a cheap dc-dc buck converter that was an absolute RF nightmare, replaced it with a linear regulated supply and the noise floor dropped like 20dB.

for the battery question, honestly for a 6 hour exercise with an ic-7300 if youre not running 100% transmit you could probably get away with a second 40ah battery in parallel and leave the generator as backup. or bring both. no shame in having options at an exercise, thats basically the point.

yeah the asphalt radial thing is annoying, ive just laid them on top and taped down the ends so nobody trips, works fine electrically even if it looks janky. for a parking lot i usually do like 8 radials minimum just fanning out from the base, you dont get the same performance as buried radials but its not as bad as people make it sound for local net work.

one thing i'll say about the buddipole as a vertical on 40 — watch your feedpoint impedance, at 25 feet youre going to want to play with the coil settings more than the manual suggests depending on what the SWR looks like. ive had better luck on 40 with it slightly detuned and letting the tuner in the 7300 sort it out than trying to nail resonance exactly. the 80m setup is where it gets fiddly, takes me a few tries every time.