so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up next saturday and im trying to put together a halfway decent portable station that can actually do something useful rather than just checking in on the net and calling it a day. the plan is to set up at the county EOC backup site which is basically a parking lot next to an old fire station — no shore power, no nothing.

ive been going back and forth on the antenna situation. i have a buddipole that ive used a few times but honestly i never feel like im getting the most out of it when im in a hurry. also have an end-fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun that i just throw up in a tree if theres one nearby, which there might not be at this particular site. thinking about bringing both and deciding on the spot.

power is the bigger headache for me right now. i have a 100ah lifepo4 battery that should be fine for a few hours of HF work at maybe 50-75w but the exercise is supposed to run like 8-10 hours and i dont know if i want to push it that long without some kind of charging source. my neighbor has a 2000w honda inverter generator i can borrow but that feels like massive overkill and it's loud. anybody running a smaller genny for this kind of thing? or solar if the weather cooperates? forecast is looking partly cloudy so maybe 60% effective at best on panels.

also curious what people bring for digital — im thinking just a laptop with fldigi and a signalink but im open to other ideas if theres something more packable.

for the generator question, a lot of guys in our group run the eu2200i honda or the predator 2000 from harbor freight — the predator is way cheaper and honestly pretty quiet for the price, about 65db at load which isnt bad. but if youre only running 100w HF and some accessories you probably dont need anything close to 2kw. a 1000w class inverter genny is plenty and easier to haul. that said if you have the 2000 available for free id just take it, the extra headroom is nice if someone else needs to charge something or you end up running longer than planned.

on the antenna stuff i'd say the efhw is usually faster to deploy if you can get any kind of support up, even a painters pole or a mast section will work. the buddipole is more versatile but setup time kills you when youre trying to get on the air fast during an exercise. i keep a 31ft jackite pole in the truck specifically for this reason, throw the efhw up in like 5 minutes and youre done.

signalink plus fldigi is totally fine, thats basically the standard for this kind of thing. winlink is probably what your EC wants you to run anyway so make sure you have that configured too before you show up.

the solar thing is doable but yeah 60% sky is gonna cut into your output pretty hard. i ran a 200w panel at a similar exercise last fall and was getting maybe 6-7 amps on a partly cloudy day, which was enough to keep pace with my radio draw but not really charging the battery back up. its more like a slow drain vs a fast drain situation. if the exercise is 8-10 hours id honestly just bring the generator as a backup even if you dont think youll need it, nothing worse than going QRT two hours before the exercise ends because you ran out of juice and look like you didnt plan ahead.

what radio are you running by the way? that changes the math on battery runtime quite a bit.