so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and i got volunteered to handle the portable comms station setup which is fine i do this stuff anyway but this time they want us to run for a solid 8 hours without any shore power and i'm trying to figure out the best approach

right now my plan is to run my IC-7300 on a 100ah lithium battery with a 200w panel feeding a Victron MPPT controller, that setup has worked okay for shorter stuff but 8 hours with the radio doing actual traffic handling, a laptop for winlink, and a fan because its gonna be hot in that EOC tent is making me nervous about capacity

the other option is just bring my 2000w Champion generator but that thing is loud and they specifically said they want to practice operating in a noise-reduced environment which i get because in a real deployment you dont always have a genny running

on the antenna side i was thinking my Chameleon MPAS 2.0 on a 20 foot fiberglass mast, that covers most of the HF bands we'd need and setup time is maybe 15 minutes which is good. anybody dealt with a similar setup for a full day exercise and how did your power hold up

the math on your battery is gonna be tighter than you think. IC-7300 at 100w output is pulling maybe 20-22 amps on transmit, call it 2-3 amps on receive, laptop probably another 3-4 amps, fan depending on size maybe 2-4 amps. if your traffic is anything like our exercises you're maybe 20-30% transmit duty cycle but those numbers add up fast over 8 hours especially if cloud cover kills your solar gain mid-day

i did a similar exercise last summer with a 100ah LiFePO4 and a 175w panel and we made it through 7.5 hours but it was close and we had good sun all day. honestly id bring a small quiet inverter generator as a backup even if you dont plan to run it, just have it there. the Honda EU2200i is pretty quiet, like 48-57 dB depending on load, way better than the Champion. or look into whether you can get a second battery and just parallel them, thats what i ended up doing after that exercise

Chameleon MPAS is a solid choice for that kind of deployment, ive used one for two years at field events and its pretty forgiving when you're setting up on weird terrain. only thing i'd say is if you're doing any 40m traffic nets make sure you have enough radials or a decent ground plane under it, i had some weird high angle issues one time that turned out to be a ground problem not the antenna itself

on the generator thing, yeah i hear you, the noise issue is real especially when you're trying to coordinate voice traffic and somebody's genny is chugging away nearby. our group actually banned generators within 50 feet of any operating position which sounds excessive but it genuinely helps