so we have a county ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with setting up the primary comms station at a park shelter that has no shore power. been doing this for a few years but our previous guy always handled the generator and i never really paid close attention to what he was running. now its on me and im kind of piecing it together from memory and what i can google.

current plan is to run my IC-7300 plus a small laptop for winlink and maybe a second VHF radio for local coordination. thinking about bringing my Honda EU2200i which should be more than enough wattage wise but i've heard weird things about the 7300 and inverter generators, something about the stepped sine wave or whatever causing RFI into the receiver. anyone actually run this combo and had issues? or is that mostly just forum myth at this point.

for the antenna i was going to throw up my buddipole on a painters pole but honestly thinking a linked dipole might be better since we'll probably be on 40 and 80 for most of the HF work. the shelter has some decent trees nearby. anybody have a preferred portable dipole setup for this kind of thing, nothing too exotic just reliable and fast to deploy. last exercise we lost like 45 minutes just fighting with antenna stuff and it was embarrassing.

the EU2200i is actually really clean, honda's inverter output is about as good as you're gonna get without going to a pure sine inverter battery setup. ive run my 7300 off one for a full weekend at a hamfest and the noise floor was fine, S1 at worst on 40m and that was probably more from the other vendors nearby. just keep the generator downwind and as far from the antenna feedline as you can manage, like 30-40 feet if the extension cord allows it. ferrite on the power cable going to the radio helps too, i run a couple of snap-ons near the radio end.

for the dipole, honestly a linked dipole on a single rope between two trees is hard to beat for fast deployment if you already know your tie-off points. i use the sotabeams band hopper and it goes up in maybe 15 minutes once youre comfortable with it. the buddipole is fine but yeah it takes longer to tune and if someone bumps it youre back to square one. if trees are available just go with wire.

ran almost the exact same setup at a red cross drill last spring, 7300 and a honda 2200. only issue we had was ground loops when we tied the laptop into the mix, got a nasty hum on transmit that took us forever to track down. ended up being the laptop charger sharing the same circuit as the radio. ran the laptop off its own battery after that and problem solved. worth thinking about ahead of time so you dont lose time troubleshooting during the actual exercise.

also if you have any budget at all grab a small LiFePO4 battery as a backup, even a 20ah one. generators can be finicky cold morning starts and having 20 minutes of radio time while you sort out the genny is worth its weight. we use a bioenno 30ah and its saved us twice now.