so ive been putting together a go-kit for ARES stuff and some general portable operating and im kind of going back and forth on the power situation. right now i have a 100ah LiFePO4 that runs my IC-7300 fine at home on receive but once i start transmitting at anything above like 50w it drains faster than i expected on longer activations. we had a 6 hour exercise last month and i was nursing it by the end.

the obvious answer everybody says is just bring a generator but ive had bad experiences with RFI from cheap inverter gennies. tried a harbor freight one at a field day site a couple years ago and my noise floor went from S1 to like S6 on 40m which basically made SSB phone ops miserable. is that just a grounding issue or are some generators genuinely cleaner than others

also on the antenna side im running a buddipole right now which is fine but its kind of a pain to tune for different bands and i feel like im spending half my setup time messing with it instead of operating. thinking about a end fed half wave with a 9:1 unun but not sure if that plays well on all bands without an auto tuner. anybody running something similar for rapid deployment stuff where you actually need to get on the air fast

the generator RFI thing is almost always a grounding issue in my experience. run a good ground from the generator frame to an actual stake in the ground and bond your radio chassis to the same point. also helps to run the coax away from the power cables at 90 degrees if you can manage it. i use a honda eu2200i and it's genuinely pretty quiet RF-wise once everything is properly bonded, way better than the cheap inverter units even when those claim to be pure sine wave.

for the battery side of things you might look at adding a second 50ah pack rather than one big one, easier to distribute the weight if you're humping it anywhere. and honestly if your exercise is 6 hours at moderate duty cycle you should be okay with 100ah if you're not running 100w the whole time. what's your average tx cycle looking like

yeah the efhw is what i switched to after messing with a buddipole for way too long. i use a 49:1 unun not a 9:1, the 9:1 is more for random wire situations. with a 49:1 and a 67 foot wire you get resonance on 40 20 15 and 10 pretty much without a tuner, maybe a little touch on 40 depending on how you deploy it. i just throw it over whatever tree is available and run it at a slight angle, works well enough for emcomm purposes. not a contest antenna obviously but it gets you on the air in like 10 minutes which is the whole point