so ive been putting together a go-kit for the county ARES group and we have a deployment exercise coming up next saturday and im trying to figure out the power situation once and for all. right now i have a 100ah lithium battery (the bioenno one) and a 30w solar panel but the exercise is supposedly going to run 18+ hours with multiple stations and i honestly dont know if thats going to cut it.

the other option is dragging out my honda eu2200i which i love for camping but it feels like overkill and also noise discipline is a thing the IC keeps harping about. we're going to be running an IC-7300 on HF and probably a couple VHF portables for tactical, plus a laptop for winlink. just trying to figure out what people actually do for extended field deployments because everything i read is either 'solar is king' or 'just bring a genny' with not much in between.

also on the antenna side i was thinking my 40m EFHW on a 31ft fiberglass mast but the IC keeps saying we need to be on 80m for the net control link and i dont have a great solution for that at a random field site. any thoughts on that part too would be helpful.

the bioenno 100ah is solid but 18 hours with an IC-7300 doing any real transmitting is going to be tight. depends a lot on your duty cycle obviously -- if you're mostly monitoring and doing short check-ins you might squeak by, but if someone's going to be running traffic for hours at a time you'll want more capacity or a way to recharge. i usually bring two of the 50ah ones and run them in parallel just so i have flexibility.

for the 80m antenna problem -- have you thought about just making your EFHW longer? if you're already carrying wire and a mast, cutting a 130ft wire for 80m isnt that much more effort. you'd need a different matching unit or at least a tuner on the radio end but the 7300's internal tuner might grab it depending on the feedpoint impedance. alternatively a simple inverted-L with your existing mast would get you on 80m without a massive antenna footprint. i've done that at parks activations and it works fine, not going to win any DX awards but for regional nets it's perfectly usable.

the genny question really comes down to whether quiet matters more than convenience. eu2200i is about as quiet as they get but it's still a generator. if noise discipline is a real requirement and not just the IC being fussy, go battery and plan your power budget carefully before you leave the house.

yeah the 80m thing is always the problem with portable ops, nobody wants to lug around a full size antenna but that's kind of what 80m asks for. i've had decent luck with a shortened loaded vertical for 80 -- not super efficient but gets the job done for close-in nets which is usually what ARES stuff is anyway. you're not trying to work japan, you're trying to hit a repeater or net control 30 miles away.

on the power thing, 30w of solar in october or whatever -- what's the weather like where you are? because even a 100w panel barely keeps up with a rig running at moderate power on a cloudy day and a 30w panel in marginal conditions is basically not even worth the hassle of setting it up. i'd honestly just bring the honda. yes it makes noise but so does every other piece of equipment at a real activation site and at least you know you're not going to be scrounging for power at hour 14.