so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything without lugging a full generator out to the site. the site is a park pavilion with no shore power so were going to need to bring it all ourselves.

our typical setup is an IC-7300 running at maybe 50-60w, a laptop for winlink, a small switch for the local net, and then a couple handhelds on the charger. been using a honda eu2200i for the past two years and it works great but its loud and the coordinator is already getting grief from the parks department about noise during events.

ive been looking at lifepo4 options, something in the 100-200ah range, but i honestly dont know if thats enough to run through a full 12 hour activation without worrying about it the whole time. the 7300 at 50w is drawing what, maybe 10-12 amps on transmit? and the laptop is pulling another 3-4 maybe. if were doing a lot of traffic handling its not exactly a low duty cycle situation.

also the antenna situation — right now we just throw up a resonant dipole for 40 and 80 and a vertical for vhf but getting the feedline run right at a pavilion is always a pain. anyone done something better for quick deploy field comms that doesnt take 45 minutes to set up?

the math on the lifepo4 is doable but tight depending on your actual duty cycle. 100ah at 12v gives you 1200wh, but youre not going to want to pull it below 20% on a lifepo4 so call it maybe 960wh usable. if your average draw across receive, transmit, laptop, misc is say 15 amps that gets you about 6 hours, which is cutting it close for 12. a 200ah pack would be a lot more comfortable. battleborn and a few of the dragonfly energy cells are solid but expensive. the cheaper SOK and chins batteries have been working fine for a lot of emcomm groups on a budget.

on the antenna side we switched to a linked dipole on a single mast center feed and it honestly takes maybe 10 minutes to get up. run the legs out at a slight inverted v and youre done. feedline just drops straight down from the center insulator to the radio. no horizontal feedline runs to trip over which matters at a pavilion with people walking around.

yeah the generator noise thing is real, parks departments have gotten way more strict about it over the last few years. we had a similar situation and ended up running a 120ah lifepo4 as primary with a small 1000w inverter generator as backup only — generator never even had to run during the last two exercises. if you keep the HF power down to 50w and are disciplined about the laptop and not running a bunch of chargers simultaneously you can stretch a 200ah pack a long way.

one thing that helped us was putting the laptop on a small 12v automotive style inverter instead of the big one, cuts the conversion losses down. also worth looking at whether you can run the 7300 direct off the battery at 13.8v rather than going through an inverter at all, obviously you can, im just saying dont add inverter losses where you dont need to.

the antenna thing i dont have a great answer for pavilions honestly, every site is different. we usually end up doing a lot of compromises depending on what trees or structures are nearby.