so our ARES group has a county-level simulated emergency exercise coming up and im putting together a portable station for the first time on my own, ive helped set up for others before but never been the guy responsible for the whole thing start to finish

my plan right now is to run a KX3 or maybe borrow the clubs IC-7300 depending on whats available, and for HF i was going to throw up a linked dipole on a 31ft spiderpole, which has worked fine at field day. the part im not sure about is power. the site we're at has no shore power so its either a generator or battery based

i was leaning toward a 50ah lifepo4 battery with a 30a solar controller and a 100w panel, which should be more than enough for a low power setup running maybe 50w most of the time. but someone in the group keeps insisting we need a generator for "reliability" and honestly i get where hes coming from but dragging a genny out to a park for a 6 hour exercise seems like overkill to me

anyone run extended field ops purely on battery and solar without running into problems? the exercise runs from like 0800 to 1400 so about 6 hours, partly cloudy forecast

yeah 50ah lifepo4 is plenty for that, especially if youre not running a linear or anything crazy. the 7300 pulls maybe 2a on receive and around 20a at full power transmit but if youre doing 50w its more like 10-12a peaks. over a 6 hour exercise with realistic duty cycle you're probably looking at 20-25ah total draw maybe less. i've done full day field ops on a 40ah battleborn and still had 40% left.

the solar panel is kind of a bonus at that point, with partly cloudy skies you might only get intermittent charging but honestly you dont even really need it for something that short. id bring the panel anyway since you have it but dont stress if its under a cloud half the day

the generator argument is the old school thinking, totally valid for a multi-day deployment or if youre running a full power HF station plus a repeater plus laptops, but for what you're describing its just noise and exhaust fumes and someone has to babysit the fuel level. battery is the right call here imo

linked dipole on a 31ft pole is what i use too, works great. one thing i'd double check is your feedline run, if you end up having to park the generator far away from the op position to deal with noise that becomes a whole other headache with coax lengths and all that, another reason battery just makes life simpler for a 6 hour thing.

also just make sure whoever is doing the eoc liaison has a VHF backup because ive seen HF comms go sideways at these exercises when propagation just doesnt cooperate and then everyone is scrambling