so ive been putting together a go-kit style setup for a local ARES exercise this weekend and im trying to figure out the power situation once and for all. right now i have a 100ah lithium (the bioenno one) and a small honda eu2200i that a buddy is lending me. the exercise is supposed to run about 14 hours with some overnight stuff thrown in and im running an IC-7300 plus a signalink and a raspberry pi for winlink.

my rough math says im pulling maybe 18-20 amps on transmit with everything running, maybe 8-10 on receive. so over 14 hours with a mix of rx and tx i figured the battery alone probably wont cut it unless im really careful. but i also dont want to run the honda the whole time because noise is a thing and also fuel hauling is annoying.

the antenna situation is a 40m/80m linked dipole hung as an inverted V off a 31ft jackite pole. works decent but i always feel like im fighting the feedline on 80. anyway - is anyone else doing something similar for extended field ops and how are you handling the generator/battery balance? do you just run the genny for a few hours to top off and then go quiet on battery?

yeah that charge and coast method is pretty much what most of us do for overnight stuff. run the eu2200i for a couple hours when the battery gets down to maybe 50%, get it back up to 90ish percent, shut it down. honda at that load is going to be pretty quiet anyway especially in eco mode but silence is silence when youre trying to sleep or if youre near other people.

one thing i'd look at is your feedline on 80. if you're getting high SWR or weird behavior it might just be the dipole is too short for 80 even resonant - the linked dipoles can be finicky with the link geometry. or could be a common mode issue on the coax, which gets worse in field environments where your ground situation is totally different from home. toss a few snap on ferrites near the feedpoint if you havent already, sometimes that alone cleans things up a lot. i've been running a similar setup for county emergency stuff for a few years and that was the fix for me on 75/80.

the bioenno 100ah should honestly get you pretty far if you manage the duty cycle. i ran a 7300 off a 50ah lifepo4 for almost 8 hours at a field day type event and it was fine because actual transmit time is way less than you think when you add up all the listening and typing and whatever. winlink especially isnt continuous tx so your average draw is probably lower than you're estimating.

i'd bring the honda as backup and just not stress about it. worst case you fire it up for an hour or two. also totally off topic but what mast stakes are you using for the jackite in soft ground? mine keeps wanting to tip in anything that isnt packed dirt and ive gone through like three different stake setups trying to fix it