so our ARES group has a county exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to power our station without running a genny all day. we're setting up at the fairgrounds which has zero shore power and the exercise is supposed to run about 14 hours give or take.

current plan is to run a 100w HF rig plus a 2m/70cm mobile unit, laptop for logging, and maybe a small fan if it gets hot in the tent. figured i could get away with a 100ah lifepo4 battery for most of the day and then fire up the generator when things get low but im second-guessing that now because the genny we have is this ancient 2-stroke Coleman thing that makes an absolutely ridiculous amount of RF noise. tried it at the last exercise and the S-meter was pinned half the time.

thinking about either borrowing someone's inverter generator (the quiet kind) or maybe just going with two batteries and skipping the generator entirely. also need to figure out antennas — we have a buddipole and a trapped vertical that works pretty well on 40 and 20 but i keep reading about guys using linked dipoles for this kind of thing. anyone done a long portable exercise and have thoughts on power management for a setup like this?

the RF noise from cheap generators is a real nightmare, we had the same issue a few years back. what we ended up doing was running the genny about 40 feet away from the operating position and using a long extension cord, then ran the whole thing through a good line filter. got it down to maybe S2 on a bad day which was manageable. but honestly if you can swing two 100ah lifepo4 packs youre probably fine for 14 hours depending on your actual duty cycle. if youre doing emcomm traffic handling youre not transmitting 100% of the time so the math usually works out better than you'd think.

on the antenna question — ive used linked dipoles for field stuff for a couple years now and they're really hard to beat for the weight and simplicity. throw it up in an inverted V config with a 31 foot mast and youre good on 40, 20, and 15 without retuning if you build the links right. the buddipole is fine but every time ive used one in the field someone bumps it and it needs readjusting. just my experience.

ditch the coleman, seriously. even with filtering those things are just awful for anything RF sensitive. a honda eu2200i or the yamaha equivalent will run clean enough that you wont notice it on the bands, been using one for portable ops for about 4 years and havent had issues even running it 15 feet from the antenna base. they're not cheap but if youre doing regular exercises its worth it or see if someone in the club already has one.

also 100ah lifepo4 doing 100w HF plus a laptop... you might be cutting it close depending on how hard youre driving the amp. i'd run the numbers on your actual draw before assuming it'll make it all day without a top-off charge.