so our ARES group has a county exercise coming up in about three weeks and ive been tasked with setting up the primary field station this time around. last year someone else did it and honestly i wasnt paying close enough attention to how they had everything wired up. now its my problem to figure out.

we have a honda eu2200i that the group owns, and i also have a pretty decent lithium battery setup - 100ah battleborn with a 30a victron charger. my plan was to run the radio gear off the battery and keep the generator for charging and maybe running the laptop and some other stuff. IC-7300 is the main rig, running it at like 50-60w most of the time which should be fine on the battery for a good while.

the antenna situation is where im less sure. we're going to a park with decent tree coverage and i was thinking either a linked dipole or just throw up a random wire with a tuner. someone in the group has an alexloop they keep pushing but i dunno, for a multi-hour exercise i feel like efficiency matters more than convenience. we need to hit a repeater about 35 miles out on 2m and also do some HF traffic on 40 and maybe 80 depending on conditions.

anyone run similar setups? main thing im trying to figure out is whether to bother with the genny at all or just bring extra batteries. the noise from the generator at a public park feels like it would be annoying and it draws attention we probably dont need during a drill.

the generator noise is a real consideration honestly. we stopped using ours for shorter exercises once we had enough battery capacity. for a day exercise with an IC-7300 at 50w you should be totally fine on that 100ah battleborn assuming youre not transmitting constantly - average current draw in a typical net operation is way lower than people think. maybe 8-10A average if you factor in receive current and duty cycle.

for antennas id skip the alexloop for 40/80, its fine for portable QRP stuff but if you need reliable traffic handling under less than ideal conditions a half wave dipole is just going to outperform it. the linked dipole idea is solid, throw it up as an inverted V off whatever you can find. if trees are good you can get it up high enough to matter. bring the tuner anyway for the random wire option as backup, but id lead with the dipole.

one thing i would bring the generator for - not for radio power but for the comfort stuff. running a fan or a small light at night drains batteries faster than people plan for and its nice to not have to think about it. keep it away from the operating position downwind and the noise isnt as bad as people make it out to be once youre focused on the radio.

yeah 35 miles on 2m to a repeater shouldnt be a problem with a decent yagi or even a good jpole up high enough. whats your 2m antenna situation? if youre just using a rubber duck or a short mag mount on a car roof thats probably your weak link for that path depending on terrain.

we did a similar drill last spring and the generator ended up being more hassle than it was worth for a 6 hour exercise. just brought two of those 50ah lifepo4 packs and swapped them when one got low. way quieter, way simpler, nobody gave us a second look at the park.