so we have a county-wide ARES exercise coming up and im trying to nail down the power situation before we deploy. last time we ran off a cheap harbor freight genny and had noise problems across like half the HF bands, just garbage S7-S8 hash on 40m no matter what we did. tried ferrites, tried the usual stuff, didn't really help much.

this time around I'm debating whether to just go full battery and solar instead of dealing with the genny headache. we'd be running an IC-7300 as the primary HF station and probably a second position with a 2m/70cm setup for local coordination. the 7300 pulls maybe 20-22A on transmit at 100W which is a lot to ask from batteries if the exercise runs 8+ hours with decent traffic volume.

the portable antenna situation is also kind of a mess — we have a few end-fed halfwaves that work fine but getting them up in a parking lot or field with no trees nearby is always the adventure. anyone running those SOTAbeams or the MFJ telescoping mast things for field ops? or just doing the fiberglass squid poles? curious what people are actually deploying and how its holding up in real conditions not just backyard tests

the generator noise thing is a real problem and honestly most of the cheap inverter gennys are better than the conventional ones for RF but they still need work. what helped us was getting the genny as far away from the operating position as the extension cord would allow, like 50-60 feet minimum, and using a line filter right at the radio end. still not perfect but it knocked it down to workable levels. we used a tripplite isobar type filter and combined with the distance it got us down to maybe S2-S3 which you can work through.

that said we've been slowly transitioning to LiFePO4 batteries for anything under 12 hours. two 100Ah battleborn or equivalent in parallel gives you a real comfortable margin for an 8 hour exercise even with the 7300 running hard. yeah the upfront cost is rough but hauling a genny, fuel, dealing with the fumes and exhaust placement near people — batteries win on the hassle side every time for exercises that long.

for masts we've been using the DX Wire fiberglass poles, the 10m ones, for a couple years now and they hold up pretty well. they're not cheap but havent had one fail yet in some pretty gnarly wind. the SOTAbeams carbon fiber ones are lighter but I'd be nervous about them in a real deployment where people are walking around and might bump into things. for a parking lot with no supports you really need guy lines no matter what you're using, we just use cheap paracord and tent stakes and it works fine.

on the EFHW question — we tune ours with a 9:1 or 49:1 unun depending on the band plan and just toss the far end over whatever we can find. if there's literally nothing to attach to we've done a vertical configuration off the mast which obviously isn't ideal but it works for local and regional. what feedline are you running to the radio, because that can matter a lot for the noise floor too especially near a generator