so we've got a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with setting up the primary HF station at the EOC staging area which is basically a parking lot next to a community center. no shore power guaranteed, the building might let us run an extension cord but i've been told not to count on it.

my current plan is to bring the IC-7300 and run it off a 100ah lithium battery with a 30 amp solar charge controller and two 100w panels. that should be fine for receive and light TX duty cycle but if we end up doing a lot of voice traffic it's gonna drain faster than the panels can keep up, especially if there's any cloud cover.

the other option is i bring my Honda EU2200i and just run everything off that. it's quiet enough that it wont annoy people and it'll handle the radio plus a laptop and maybe a second VHF station easily. my hesitation is RF noise - last time i ran HF off a generator i had a pretty nasty noise floor, think it was around S5 or S6 on 40m, which basically killed our ability to copy weaker stations.

did a lot of reading and it seems like a good ferrite choke on the power lead plus keeping the generator physically as far as possible helps. anyone actually done this and found a setup that works reliably? also open to thoughts on the antenna side - i was thinking a end fed halfwave on a 31ft jackite pole but the site is pretty open so maybe a fan dipole strung between two poles could work better depending on what bands we need to cover.

appreciate any thoughts, this is kind of my first time being the guy responsible for the whole station instead of just showing up and operating

the generator noise thing is real and it drove me crazy for a long time. what finally worked for me was a isolation transformer between the genny and the radio, not just ferrites on the coax or the power lead. i use a tripp lite 1kva isolation transformer and it basically killed the noise completely on my setup running a similar honda generator. the other thing is grounding - i pound a short ground rod right into whatever soil is nearby and bond the radio chassis to it, separate from the genny ground. that made a bigger difference than i expected.

physically separating the genny helps too but honestly even 50 feet of extension cord with a good isolation transformer and you're in pretty good shape. i'd still bring the battery bank as backup though, or run both - let the panels keep the battery topped off and use the genny as overflow when you're doing sustained TX. belt and suspenders for a county exercise seems reasonable, you dont want to be the station that goes QRT because you ran out of juice.

on the antenna, EFHW on a jackite works fine but if you're going to be on multiple bands and dont want to mess with an ATU constantly a fan dipole is less hassle during an actual activation. depends how many bands the exercise covers honestly.

yeah the isolation transformer suggestion above is solid. i'll add that if you havent already, look at the PowerStream or Victron stuff for keeping your lithium and solar playing nice together - the cheap PWM controllers sometimes do weird things with lithiums depending on the BMS. probably fine for a weekend but worth knowing.

one thing i'd think about for a parking lot site is the antenna feedline run. if you're stringing an EFHW and the counterpoise or the coax run goes near cars or the generator or a chain link fence you'll pick up all kinds of garbage regardless of what the genny is doing. i learned that the hard way at a public service event where the feedline was basically running parallel to a row of cars for like 40 feet and we had noise that turned out to have nothing to do with the generator at all, it was RF pickup from the cars' electronics. repositioned the whole antenna and half the noise went away.

good luck with the exercise, first time running the whole show is a bit stressful but you'll learn more in one weekend than months of reading about it