so ive been putting together a go-kit type setup for a county ARES exercise this weekend and i keep going back and forth on the power situation. right now i have a 100ah lithium battery (renogy) and a small 2000w inverter generator, one of the harbor freight predators. the plan is to run an IC-7300 plus a raspberry pi logging setup and maybe a small fan if it gets hot in the van.

my concern is noise. last time i ran the generator anywhere near the radio i got a ton of hash on the lower HF bands, 40 and 80 mostly, which is exactly where we need to be for this exercise. i ended up just running off the battery and it was fine but i didnt have anything else drawing power so it lasted okay. this time theres going to be more stuff running and probably for 6-8 hours.

thinking about just leaving the generator as a battery charger only - run it for like 30-40 mins every few hours to top off, then shut it down for actual operating. anyone done something like that? or is there a cleaner way to filter that generator noise. ive seen the bonide... i mean the bonding stuff and ferrites mentioned but never actually tried it on a generator setup

yeah the generator as charger only approach works pretty well in practice, that's basically what a lot of emcomm guys end up doing anyway once they figure out the noise problem. the predator generators are decent but they do put out a fair amount of RFI, especially the non-inverter ones. if yours is the inverter type it should be a little better but youll still want some distance between it and the antenna feedpoint.

one thing that helped me a lot was just a good common mode choke on the DC line coming off whatever charger youre using to charge the battery from the generator. like wind 10-12 turns of the DC cable through a mix 31 toroid before it hits the battery terminals. also make sure your generator chassis is actually bonded to your station ground, floating chassis can cause all kinds of weird stuff. i run a similar setup for ARES stuff and can usually get the noise floor down to acceptable levels on 40m with some patience and ferrites, but honestly the operate-off-battery, charge-when-not-transmitting method is just cleaner and less hassle for a one day exercise.

what antenna you running for this? that matters a lot for how much the generator junk actually gets into the receiver. if youre using something with a decent common mode rejection it might not be as bad as you think. i had a nightmare setup once with an end fed and a noisy generator and it was unusable, switched to a dipole with a good 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint and same generator, night and day difference.