so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and i've been tasked with putting together the portable station for the EOC support role. we're going to be outside for probably 12-14 hours and i'm trying to figure out the best way to handle power because last time we had a real mess with the generator situation.

what im thinking is running a 100w HF station (ic-7300) plus a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig for local traffic, maybe a laptop for logging and winlink. estimated draw is probably around 25-30A peak when transmitting on HF. i have a 100ah lifepo4 battery that i built last year and honestly it's been solid but i dont know if it'll last the full stretch especially if we're doing a lot of digital stuff which seems to run the radio pretty hard.

the other option is to bring our club's honda eu2200i and just run everything off that but the noise thing is a real concern. last exercise somebody put the generator like 15 feet from the antenna feedpoint and we had so much hash on 40m it was basically unusable. plus depending on where they set us up there might be fuel storage restrictions.

for antennas i was thinking a linked dipole for HF since it's quick to deploy and i have enough coax, probably hung between two of the telescoping fiberglass masts. anyone running something similar for emcomm? curious what people are doing for noise isolation if they do use a genny.

the generator noise thing is real and it bit us too a couple years back. what finally worked for us was a good ferrite common mode choke right at the radio end of the coax and another one where the power lead enters the generator's little distribution box. also just physically getting the genny as far away as the extension cord allows, like 50-60 feet minimum, made a huge difference. the eu2200i is actually one of the quieter inverter types in terms of RF but you still gotta work at it.

on the battery question — 100ah lifepo4 should theoretically get you through 12 hours if you're not transmitting constantly but digital modes like vara fm or js8call do cycle the PA pretty regularly. i'd probably bring both honestly, use the battery as primary and keep the honda on standby for when you need it. that way you can run fuel-efficient and only kick the generator on to top off the battery or if you're doing a heavy traffic period. a decent dc-dc charger between the genny's output and your battery bus cleans things up a lot too.

linked dipole is the right call for that kind of portable setup, way faster than trying to tune a random wire and you're not fighting the tuner when band conditions shift. i'd make sure your mast separation gives you at least a half wave on your lowest band though, people squeeze them together and then wonder why 40m is weird.

one thing i'll throw out there — if the noise floor ends up being bad regardless of what you do with the genny, an end-fed halfwave with a good 49:1 unun can sometimes be easier to get away from the noise sources just because you only need one feedpoint and you can orient it differently. not saying the dipole is wrong just something to consider if you end up in a tight space.