During the last winter field day I thought I would try taking the IC-2KL amp and just see if it was worthwhile.
It would seem that it is since it is fairly small (of course the power supply is pretty heavy). If you have a
generator it would help when making scheduled comms on the NFL emergency net on 40 and 80 meters. 6 dB is still 6 dB.
For just hobby work from the camper I would not bother with it.
In the case of emergency response the Air Force found out they they were not ready and their Communications guys had become more IT techs.
I had the opportunity to work with a few at Hurlburt and refresh their skills on antennas and HF communications and get their PRC-150s out of the cases and find out all of their back up batteries were bad and their ALE programs were lost. There has since been a major push to get back up to speed and work on interoperability with other services.
Since my rig includes a van with more room for supplies and equipment and our deployments will most likely not include long distance high speed highway work I have set up totes with the necessary antennas and equipment along with food and water.
In that space I would probably take my IC-2KL along with the
generator and extra fuel.
Normal operations just for fun, not so much as I would just keep it simple and quick.
We found during Michael most comms were VHF/UHF to repeaters away from the coast. The problem was that that hurricane was so powerful that the nearest repeater towers were blown away and the fiber networks were down as well. Oddly the fiber was lost when trees blew down, uprooting the buried fiber. Anything relying on those networks was down as well and that included the new digital trunked emergency communications for the sheriff, fire, and police. To make connection to those distant repeaters required some experimentation and trial and error. It is also hard to hang an antenna from a tree when all of the trees are missing.
We learned a good bit from Michael as did the military. Currently they are working to get back up to speed on HF after getting spoiled by the Starwars systems.