so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up and i volunteered to run one of the remote stations this time instead of just being at EOC. been doing some thinking about the power situation and wanted to get some input because ive never actually run a full HF setup off a generator in the field before, only batteries.

the plan right now is to bring my IC-7300 plus a 100ah lithium and also have a honda EU2200i as backup or to recharge during the day. antenna-wise i was thinking of putting up a 40m EFHW with the 9:1 unun since its fast to deploy and i already have it tuned up, but part of me wonders if i should bother with a more versatile antenna given we'll be doing mostly local nets on 40 and some regional traffic on 20.

my main concern is noise from the generator getting into the radio. last time somebody ran a genny at a field day site near me it was a mess on 40, just broadband hash across half the band. the EU2200i is inverter type so its supposed to be cleaner but i dont know how much that actually helps in practice versus a conventional generator. thinking about a ferrite on the coax and maybe running the generator pretty far away with a longer extension cord but thats another thing to manage.

anyone done something similar for an actual exercise, not just field day? wondering if theres a setup that just works without a lot of fiddling once youre there trying to also handle actual message traffic.

the EU2200i is genuinely pretty clean in my experience, way better than the old style generators. i ran my 7300 off one for about 8 hours at a simulated emergency exercise last year and didnt really have noise problems, but i did run a good 50 feet of extension cord and kept the genny downwind. the bigger thing honestly is the grounding — i drove a short ground rod at my operating position and bonded everything together and that cleaned up a lot more than moving the generator did.

for your antenna situation the EFHW is fine, honestly for a single-band exercise where you just need reliable 40m copy i wouldnt overthink it. the only time id say bring something more flexible is if the net control frequency changes or if you end up needing 80m for closer stations, which happens more than people expect in my area. maybe throw an 80m resonant wire in your bag just in case, costs you nothing in weight.

one thing that bit me — make sure your battery and the generator arent both connected trying to charge and supply simultaneously unless you know your charging setup handles that cleanly. i had a weird voltage fluctuation issue that turned out to be exactly that.

yeah the inverter generator thing is real, conventional gennys are basically RF noise machines. that said even with a EU2200i ive seen people pick up noise when the load changes, like when a charger kicks in or something cycles. ferrite chokes are cheap insurance, wouldnt skip them.

EFHW for what youre describing sounds totally reasonable to me. 40 and 20 on the same wire if you trim it right and that 9:1 handles the impedance swing well enough for most tuners to clean up the rest. just make sure you have your counterpoise sorted before you get there, not when youre setting up in a field in the dark.