so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to get our go-kit situation sorted out before then. we've done these before but this time the EOC wants us to set up a secondary comms node about 2 miles from the main site, basically in a parking lot with no shore power, so we're finally forced to actually use our generator setup properly instead of just pretending we have one.

my main question is around generator sizing. we're planning to run an IC-7300 for HF, an FT-991A for VHF/UHF, and probably a laptop for logging plus maybe a second one for winlink. i've seen people say a 2000 watt inverter generator is plenty for this kind of load but i'm not totally convinced when you factor in tx peaks. the IC-7300 at 100w output is pulling what, maybe 22-23 amps at 13.8v? plus the 991 on top of that. feels like a lot of simultaneous draw if both ops are transmitting at the same time which in an exercise scenario they probably will be.

also the antenna situation - we have a buddipole that works ok but ive never been super happy with it for anything below 20m in the field. thinking about just throwing up a wire dipole on a 31 foot jackite pole and calling it good for 40m operations. anyone done the jackite + random wire or center fed dipole combo for portable and found a decent way to stake it in a parking lot surface? last time we used a camera tripod as the mast base and it worked but felt kinda sketchy in any wind.

the generator sizing thing is something i went back and forth on for a long time. ended up getting a honda eu2200i and honestly it handles our go-kit fine and that's running an 857D, a cheap toughbook, and a 2m rig simultaneously. the key thing people miss is that those "rated watt" numbers from the radio specs assume worst case duty cycle - in practice especially on HF with SSB you're not peaking 100% of the time. even in a busy exercise scenario the average draw is way lower than the peak. that said if you're worried about it just run the HF rig off a separate battery float charged by the genny and let the gen handle the laptop and the VHF rig directly, keeps everything cleaner anyway.

for the jackite in a parking lot - we carry a couple of those water-fillable pvc bases, the kind people use for PVC pipe signs. fill em with water on site and zip tie the jackite to a piece of rebar stuck in the top. has survived some pretty gnarly conditions at our county events. the camera tripod thing scares me too, especially if theres any kind of guying situation you might need.

yeah the buddipole below 20m situation is real, its just awkward to tune and the efficiency isnt great when youre already compromised on height. a simple 40m dipole cut to length is going to outperform it pretty much every time on that band in my experience. i use a 9:1 unun with about 65 feet of wire as a kind of sloper off the jackite when im feeling lazy about it and that seems to work reasonably well with the tuner in the 7300.

one thing i'd flag for your exercise - if both sites are transmitting on HF at the same time even on different bands, think about intermod and how close your antennas are to each other at the primary site. we had a really weird situation at our last drill where the 40m station was wiping out the 2m repeater link because somone had run the coax too close to the VHF feedline. took us like 45 minutes to figure out what was happening and it was embarrassing in front of the served agency folks lol.