so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and i'm trying to figure out the best way to handle power for an extended deployment, like potentially 18-24 hours at a remote site. the site has no shore power obviously and we're debating whether to bring a generator or just go all-in on battery/solar.

my current thinking is a honda eu2200i paired with a 100ah lithium, basically run the genny a few hours to top the battery and then run off battery the rest of the time so we're not sitting there with that thing running all night. antenna wise i was planning on throwing up a linked dipole on a 31ft fiberglass mast, should be fine for 40 and 80 which is what we mostly need for the exercise nets.

the part i keep going back and forth on is noise. last time we ran a generator near an HF station it was a mess, rf everywhere and the audio on receive was garbage. we had it maybe 30 feet away and ran a long extension cord. is there a standard practice for how far you want the genny from the rig or is it more about bonding and filtering than distance?

running an IC-7300 and a little signalink for any digital if needed. any experience with this kind of setup would be helpful, especially if you've actually done extended ARES or RACES deployments and not just a few hours in a parking lot

the noise issue is almost definitely a grounding/bonding problem more than distance, though distance helps too. what we figured out after a lot of frustrating events is that you need to bond the generator chassis to your station ground, a lot of people skip this because it seems counterintuitive but a floating generator chassis is basically an antenna for all that ignition noise. run a decent gauge wire from the genny frame to your station ground rod and it makes a huge difference.

also check what's on the same circuit as your rig. if you're running lights or a fan off the same generator leg as the radio that can cause issues too. we dedicated one leg of a bigger genny to radio only stuff for a deployment last fall and it cleaned things up considerably. your plan with the eu2200i is solid by the way, those run pretty clean from the inverter output compared to a conventional genny, but they're still not perfect. the battery buffer idea is exactly what i'd do, let the genny charge during the day and kill it overnight. 30 feet is probably okay but i'd try for more if you have the extension cord for it, and use a good heavy gauge cord not some 16 gauge thing from the hardware store.

linked dipole on a 31ft mast should work fine for 40/80, just make sure your feedline is decent and dont skimp on the choke balun at the feedpoint, that'll help with some of the common mode noise issues too regardless of your power situation. ive seen setups where a lot of what people blamed on the generator was actually common mode current on the coax coming back into the rig.

for the exercise itself honestly the battery-first approach makes a lot of sense from an operational standpoint too, generators break, run out of fuel, somebody forgets to check the oil... a well charged lithium with a solar panel backup is just fewer failure points. 100ah lithium running an ic-7300 at maybe 50% power and moderate duty cycle you could probably go 8-10 hours easy without touching the genny at all depending on how much transmitting you're actually doing.