so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about 3 weeks and im finally putting together a proper go-kit style field station instead of just throwing stuff in the back of my truck and hoping for the best. been doing this long enough to know better but never really sat down and thought it through systematically until now.

the main question i keep going back and forth on is whether to bring the honda eu2200i or just lean on the LiFePO4 battery setup i've been building out. the battery is a 100ah battleborn with a 30a dc-dc charger and i can run the ic-7300 all day on that no problem for typical emcomm traffic loads, maybe 20-30w average, not like im running a pileup. the issue is if this turns into an extended thing or they want me to run higher power for some reason.

antenna side im thinking the chameleon emcomm III portable for HF, its quick to get up and doesnt need a perfect counterpoise situation which matters when youre in a parking lot or some random park. have a 2m/70cm jpole for local stuff. been debating whether to bother with a mast or just slap the chameleon in a tree if theres one around.

anyone run a similar setup for exercises? curious if the generator is even worth the noise and hassle for a one or two day thing

for a one or two day exercise id skip the generator honestly. 100ah lifepo4 with a 7300 at reasonable power is plenty, ive done 14+ hour activations on similar setups and still had 40% left. the generator becomes worth it when youre talking multi-day or if you need to run 100w consistently or youve got other loads like a laptop, lighting, maybe a second radio. the eu2200i is a great unit but its another thing to fuel, maintain, haul, and the noise thing is real — people complain, it draws attention, and in some venues they wont let you run it at all.

on the antenna, chameleon emcomm III is solid but if you can get any kind of wire up in a tree even a random length end fed with a 9:1 unun and your tuner will probably outperform it just on efficiency. that said the convenience factor of the chameleon is real when youre trying to set up fast under pressure which is kind of the whole point of an exercise

bring both and decide when you get there is my vote. I know that sounds like a cop out but seriously the situations you end up in at these exercises are never what you planned for. I've shown up expecting shade trees and ended up in a gravel lot with zero anchor points, or the opposite where a simple wire in a tree woulda been perfect but I left the wire at home because I overthought the antenna selection.

the generator question — I keep mine in the truck as backup but I've only actually fired it up maybe twice in the last year of exercises. mostly the battery carries it fine. one thing i will say is make sure your dc-dc charger can also take input from the generator if it ends up running, some setups get weird when you have both a solar input and a generator input going through a combiner and then into the battery, had a weird voltage spike situation once that I still don't fully understand what happened