so we've got a ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i'm trying to figure out the best way to handle power for a 48 hour deployment. the site is a county fairground, no shore power anywhere near where they want us set up, and we're talking about running two HF stations plus a VHF/UHF repeater crossband setup and some digital stuff on a laptop.

my gut says just bring the honda eu2200i I already own and call it day, but a couple of the other guys want to do a pure battery/solar setup and honestly i'm not sold on that for 48 hours with that much load. we did the rough math and we're looking at maybe 20-25 amps average draw when both HF rigs are in receive and the repeater is idling, and obviously way more when someone keys up.

the antenna situation is also a mess. last exercise we used a couple of NVIS inverted-Ls off a 30ft telescoping mast and they worked okay but setup took forever. thinking about maybe doing a linked dipole this time so we can cover 40 and 80 without retuning, or maybe just a fan dipole. anybody run fan dipoles in a field setting and had good results, or does the feedline situation become a nightmare with all the other RF floating around?

also just generally curious what other people are bringing to these things these days. feels like every exercise I read about online is different and half of them dont really talk about what actually went wrong.

the eu2200i is the right call for 48 hours with that load, full stop. solar and battery sounds great on paper but I've seen it fall apart on cloudy days or when someone forgets to watch state of charge and suddenly the whole station goes down at 2am. generator gives you predictable runtime, you know exactly how much fuel you need, and you can throttle down or up as needed. we ran a similar setup at a RACES activation last fall and having a dedicated fuel rotation schedule was honestly more important than the hardware itself.

on the antenna side, ive been using a homebrewed fan dipole for about three years now in field conditions and yeah the feedline thing is real, especially if people are walking around camp. I switched to a 4:1 current balun at the feedpoint and run a single piece of LMR-400 back to the station and that helped a lot with common mode noise. the linked dipole is probably easier to deploy quickly if time matters but the fan dipole once it's up is just done, nothing to mess with between bands which i like during an actual activation when you're busy.

for what its worth the linked dipole vs fan dipole thing kind of depends on how much your feedline run is and how picky your tuner is going to be. i ran a fan cut for 40/80 last summer for a SOTA thing, totally different context i know, but once you get the element lengths trimmed out it really does just work. the only pain was the drooping elements catching on stuff during setup in the dark.

one thing nobody talks about enough for generator setups is RF getting into the generator itself or the grounding situation. we had weird noise on 40m at one exercise traced back to the generator frame not being bonded to the station ground at all. threw in a single stake and a short run of #12 and it mostly went away. might be worth thinking about ahead of time rather than troubleshooting it at 0300 during the exercise.