so our ARES group has a county exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable station setup that needs to run for potentially 12+ hours. we've done shorter stuff before but nothing this long and the power question is where i keep going back and forth.

current plan is to bring my IC-7300 as the main HF station and probably an FT-60 handheld for local VHF coordination. antenna wise i was thinking my buddipole for HF and just a jpole for 2m hung off whatever's around. the site is a county EOC parking lot so we should have some vertical clearance options.

here's where im stuck - do i just haul out my honda eu2200i and call it a day, or is it worth trying to run the whole thing off a 100ah lithium battery bank with a solar panel topped up? the 7300 pulls maybe 22 amps on transmit and considerably less on receive, so the math kind of works but barely if we're doing a lot of talking. the generator is loud and i hate the idea of it running all day but it's bulletproof reliable. the battery route feels cleaner but if i miscalculate duty cycle i'm stuck.

anyone done long haul field setups and found a good middle ground here? also open to antenna suggestions if the buddipole seems overkill for a parking lot exercise, maybe something simpler to set up fast

ran a 12 hour ARES activation last fall with almost the exact same question nagging at me. ended up doing both - brought a 100ah lifepo4 as primary and kept the honda staged in the truck as a backup/recharge option. ran about 6 hours purely on battery doing moderate voice traffic on 40m, 7300 set to about 80 watts which helped a lot. when the battery got down around 20% i fired up the generator just long enough to top it back up and then shut it off. neighbors at adjacent booths appreciated not listening to that thing all day.

the buddipole is fine but honestly for a parking lot if you can get any kind of mast up, even a 20ft painters pole, a simple end fed halfwave is faster to deploy and i've found it performs just as well or better on the bands i usually work. the buddipole takes forever to tune if conditions change and you want to shift bands mid exercise. just my experience with it anyway

yeah the duty cycle thing is the real gotcha with battery only setups. people always calculate worst case transmit draw but in practice on a nets and traffic exercise youre probably sitting at receive current most of the time which on the 7300 is what, like 2 amps? so the actual average might be way lower than you think depending on how the exercise is structured.

one thing worth doing before you go is just run your actual gear for a couple hours at home and log how fast the battery drops. way better than doing math that turns out to be wrong at the worst time. also if you havent looked at it, the 7300 has a power limit setting buried in the menu somewhere, dropping to 50 watts makes a noticeable difference in draw and for most emcomm work youre not trying to work dx anyway so who cares