so we've got a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i commit to hauling everything out. we're looking at running two HF stations simultaneously, probably an IC-7300 and a 7100, plus a VHF/UHF station for local coordination, and someone wants to bring a laptop for winlink so that's another draw on top of everything.

my gut says bring the Honda EU2200i and call it a day but a couple guys in the group are pushing hard for the battery-only approach with a big LiFePO4 bank. the thing is we're talking about a 14-hour deployment potentially going longer if things run over, and i honestly dont know if a 100Ah or even a 200Ah battery setup is gonna cut it without being really disciplined about duty cycle. the generator just runs, you know? you dont have to think about it.

the other part of this is antennas. we've been going back and forth on whether to bring the club's Buddipole setup or just throw up a couple of end-fed half-waves. the EFHW goes up faster but the Buddipole can be optimized better on specific bands and we might be doing some NVIS work on 60m if the exercise scenario calls for it. anybody done extended field deployments where you actually compared these things in a real stressed situation?

the generator question is pretty much always gonna come down to runtime vs noise floor and logistics. i've run the EU2200i at a couple EOC activations and it's solid but man the fuel logistics for a 14+ hour op get annoying if you dont pre-position gas cans. that said i'd still take it over babysitting a battery bank any day during an actual exercise where i'm already thinking about a hundred other things.

for what its worth we did a hybrid setup last fall — ran the Honda most of the time but had a 100Ah Dakota Lithium as a buffer so if the genny needed to shut down for refueling or whatever the stations stayed up. worked really well actually. the battery also cleaned up some of the noise that was getting into the 7300 when we were running close to the generator.

on the antenna side if you're doing NVIS on 60m seriously just throw up the EFHW at low height and call it done. the Buddipole is great gear but it takes longer to tweak and on a 60m setup you're already fighting the band plan restrictions, last thing you want is to be fussing with element lengths when the net control is waiting on you.

14 hours on batteries is doable but you have to be real about your numbers. two rigs at 100W output are gonna pull maybe 20-22A each on transmit, less on receive obviously but if you're doing any kind of digital modes or running winlink your duty cycle is higher than you think. rough math on a 200Ah LiFePO4 at say 50% average load is still gonna be tight and that's before the laptop and any lighting or accessories people inevitably plug in because someone forgot to charge their phone lol.

generator wins for an op that long in my opinion, the EU2200i is quiet enough that it wont kill you and you can parallel a second one if you ever need more headroom. the inverter output is clean enough for the rigs too, ive never had RFI issues from it at a reasonable distance.