so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down a solid portable setup. ive done a few of these before but this time they want us to run for 12 hours straight which is longer than anything ive done off grid before. my normal go-bag stuff works fine for 3-4 hours but im not confident about sustained ops.

right now i have a 100ah LiFePO4 battery that i run my IC-7300 off of, and it does okay for casual use but 12 hours of mixed TX/RX is a different story. been thinking about either adding a second battery or just biting the bullet and bringing a generator. the thing is nobody in our group really wants to deal with the noise and fuel hassle of a genny during something that's supposed to simulate a real disaster scenario, plus some of the sites we might be at dont allow gas powered equipment indoors.

on the antenna side ive been messing around with a 40m EFHW that i throw up with a 31 foot jackite pole and that works great but im wondering if i should bring a vertical as a backup. last exercise we had someone's dipole come down in the wind and they were off the air for like 45 minutes while they sorted it out. trying not to repeat that.

anybody run something like this for extended emcomm ops? whats your power budget look like for a 12 hour shift?

the LiFePO4 question is pretty easy to math out honestly. IC-7300 at 100 watts draws roughly 20-22 amps TX, maybe 2-3 amps on receive. if you're doing typical emcomm traffic duty cycle is pretty low, like maybe 20-25% transmit so your average draw is probably somewhere around 6-8 amps depending on what you're actually doing. 100ah gets you through 12 hours with room to spare if you're not running hot the whole time, but i'd still bring a second battery just because murphy's law is real and equipment fails at the worst time.

skip the generator if you can. ive been doing emcomm stuff for about 12 years now and every time someone shows up with a honda eu2200 or whatever they spend half the exercise managing fuel and exhaust placement. solar + battery is a much cleaner answer for daylight ops. even a 100 watt panel can keep up with your average draw if the sun cooperates. two panels and you're golden.

on the antenna thing, EFHW on a jackite is hard to beat for quick deployment but yeah wind is always a risk if you're not guying the pole properly. ive switched to using three guy lines on anything over 20 feet and havent had a pole go down since. a hamstick on a mag mount or a quick vertical as backup is smart, just dont overthink it.

we ran a 18 hour exercise last fall and the generator debate came up for us too. ended up with one team running a yamaha inverter genny and one team on straight battery with a 200 watt solar setup and honestly the battery/solar team had way fewer problems. the genny team kept fussing with it, ran it out of fuel once, and the noise was a constant complaint from everyone around them.

one thing nobody mentioned yet — whats your feedline situation? ive seen people get a perfect antenna up and then lose half their signal to a sketchy coax connector or RG-58 run thats way too long. for portable stuff i dont run anything longer than about 50 feet of LMR-400 equivalent and i keep all my PL-259s freshly soldered. sounds basic but field conditions are rough on connectors.