so we had our quarterly ARES exercise last weekend and i finally got to deploy the full field kit ive been building up over the past year or so. overall it went pretty well but man the generator situation was a nightmare and i wanted to see if anyone else has dealt with this.

running a Honda EU2200i which i know is supposed to be inverter-quiet but i was still getting hash all over 40m and some on 80m too. tried moving it about 30 feet away from the operating position, ran the power cable along the ground away from the antenna feedline, still getting it. the antenna is a trapped vertical, nothing exotic. grounding the genny frame helped a tiny bit but not enough to actually work the net cleanly.

i ended up switching over to the LiFePO4 battery pack for the radio and just used the honda to trickle charge it through a small inverter charger, keeping the genny completely out of the DC loop for the radio itself. that actually cleaned things up a lot but now im worried about runtime if were ever deployed for more than like 6-8 hours.

anyone running a similar setup for extended ops? curious what people are doing for power management when you need both reliable runtime AND clean RF. also open to thoughts on whether a different antenna would be less susceptible to that kind of noise — the vertical pickup pattern is pretty omni which is great for nets but maybe a dipole up in the trees would reject more of the local noise?

yeah the EU2200i is quiet acoustically but the switching noise on the DC output can still be garbage depending on whats drawing from it. the trick of isolating the radio from the genny through a battery is exactly right and honestly thats how most serious emcomm guys run it. battery handles the radio, genny handles the battery. you just size the battery pack for your expected ops tempo and make sure your charger can keep up with average draw not peak draw.

for 6-8 hours of HF work on something like an IC-7300 at moderate power you're probably looking at 30-40Ah realistically if youre not keying 100% of the time. a 50Ah LiFePO4 with a decent 20-30A charger running off the honda should be totally fine, genny doesnt even have to run continuously. run it an hour, top off the battery, shut it down, repeat. keeps the noise windows short and saves fuel.

on the antenna question — a dipole will definitely have less ground-level noise pickup than a vertical in most cases, especially if you can get it up 20-25 feet. for a net where you know the rough direction of the NCS a sloper might be worth trying too.

ferrite cores. seriously just go nuts with them on every cable coming out of that generator. i had almost the exact same problem with a different inverter genny a couple years back and wrapping the DC output cable with a bunch of mix-31 toroids right at the genny output dropped the noise floor noticeably. also check that your ground rod at the operating position is actually bonded to the radio chassis and not just sitting there looking pretty — ive seen people pound a rod in and then not actually connect it to anything and wonder why its not helping lol.

the battery isolation approach works too but like you said runtime becomes a thing. i just bring two batteries and rotate them personally, bit old school but it works.