so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the primary HF station at the EOC staging area, which is basically a parking lot behind the old fairgrounds. no shore power available so we're running off whatever we bring.

the club has a Honda EU2200i that we've used before and it runs great, quiet enough that you can actually have a conversation next to it, but im wondering if it's worth the hassle of hauling it out versus just going deep cycle and maybe a decent LiFePO4 battery bank. the rig we're running is an IC-7300 which pulls maybe 20A on transmit and we'll have it going pretty much continuously for 8-10 hours with a laptop, a few phone chargers for the served agency people, and whatever else gets plugged in.

for the antenna i was thinking of putting up a linked dipole — got a nice homebrew one that does 40/20/15 and tunes up decent on 80 with a little help from the 7300's tuner, maybe 35 feet at the apex off a push-up mast. the site is pretty open which is good but there's a chain link fence running along one side that i'm a little worried about.

anyway the main thing i want to figure out is whether a battery-only setup is even realistic for that kind of runtime or if i just suck it up and bring the genny. anyone done similar stuff and have a rough sense of what they were burning through?

done a lot of these and honestly for 8-10 hours of real operations with that load profile you're describing, battery only is going to be a stretch unless you're bringing serious capacity. the 7300 on SSB voice averages out lower than peak but if you're doing any digital or long transmit periods it adds up fast. figure maybe 8-10Ah average per hour being conservative across everything you mentioned, so you're looking at needing 80-100Ah of usable capacity minimum and that's if you dont run anything to zero.

the EU2200i honestly is the easy answer here. yeah it's a pain to drag out but once it's running you stop thinking about power and start thinking about actually doing comms, which is the whole point. you can also top off a battery bank while it runs so you get the best of both. chain link fence probably wont kill you if you keep the antenna away from it, i've worked with worse nearby and the linked dipole should do fine. just orient it so the wire isn't running parallel right above the fence line.

yeah what he said about the generator. we tried going all-battery at a simplex exercise last summer with a similar setup and we were babysitting the voltage by hour six. not a good look when you're supposed to be demonstrating reliable field comms to the county emergency manager.

one thing i'll throw in — if you do bring the Honda, get a good 30ft extension cord so you can tuck the genny away from the operating position. nothing like trying to copy a weak station over a generator buzzing three feet from your head. also if anyone on your team has a small solar panel kicking around even a couple hundred watts thrown on the battery bank during the day can make a noticeable difference as a supplement, not a replacement obviously.