The tent I ordered a couple months ago finally arrived. Medium Autohome Columbus Variant tent, it's about 56" wide and 84" long. Here's more pictures of the tent.

I finally got around to taking some pictures of the CB install.  After screwing around for years with FRS (the Motorola "talk-about" radios), cheap CBs and antennas with magnetic mounts from Radio Shack, etc I finally did what I should have done from the beginning.  I actually did this install a while ago, but I never got around to putting up pictures.

I picked up a Uniden PRO520XL CB from Amazon.com for $48 or so, this is a great little unit.  The extra $6 over the 510XL gets you a receiver gain control and a PA output, well worth it.  The mounting bracket is from Quadratec, and secures the radio right next to the transfer case shifter.  It's generally out of sight but you only need to look at it to change the channel, the rest of the controls are easy to operate without looking at the deck.







The antenna is a 3' top-loaded antenna I picked up at SBS electronics (can't remember the brand), and the mount is the Teraflex spare tire bracket. You have to run the cable through the tailgate, under the plastic cover, across the gap with the cables for the above-the-spare brake light. Once inside the jeep, the cable runs under the carpet on the passenger side, under the passenger seat and then across to the CB. I think the cable I bought was 18' long, and I ended up using every inch of it.





Because the CB sits right next to your leg, I ended up using an external speaker. I bought a "big mouth" 3x3x3" weather resistant speaker from the same CB store I got the antenna at, I think it was $15 or so. Added about 6' of mono headphone cable to what comes with the speaker, and I was able to put the speaker right next to my ear. I carved a recess in the hard foam that surrounds the roll cage. This works really well and is easily loud enough even if you have the radio turned up too.

I finally bought a rack for the jeep -- a Kargo Master Congo Cage, bought it from 4wheelparts.com and they had free shipping to a local store.  Nice deal on a rack with a 500lb dynamic (!) load rating.  I also picked up the "utility crossbar" kit for the rack, it adds two 66" x 2" crossbars, very sturdy.

The rack itself goes together pretty easily. The brackets bolt onto the top of the windshield hinges and where the rear bumper attaches to the frame. Both appear to be very sturdy attachment points. You have to use a lot of silicon sealant in the process, and it's very messy to be sure to pick up some surgical gloves. The instructions are not bad, I basically put all the brackets on and then assembled the rack from back to front. It took me about four hours and I feel like I took my time.

I've got more pictures at my smugmug site, here's a few:









The rack attaches to the windshield hinges in front:



and to the rear bumper where it meets the frame. It's a little hard to see, it's the bracket in the center of this image:



The bracket lets the rack attach just above the rear bumper. It looks like it rests on the bumper, but it doesn't.





After crawling around on a trail, I noticed that the rack has a tendency to rock front to back if you're juddering along in low range. It seems like this is OK, hopefully it won't stress the welds too much... I decided to put some rubber stoppers on the front support pillars, this should keep it from rocking too far and from hitting the windshield frame.

This is a rubber stopper I bought at Lowes, size #9-1/2. I drilled a hole through it for the zip tie and cut out a bit of a channel in it so that it would sit on the cage frame better. I applied a healthy coat of RTV sealant to help keep it in place and cinched down the zip tie. If the cage rocks too far back it should just push the stopper against the top of the windshield frame.

Took my first trip to Moab in the new Jeep over Thanksgiving break this year. What else can you say, there's always something fun to do in Moab.  More pics over at smugmug.

I took a drive with my sister up to Breckenridge and drove Boreas Pass out then came back on Georgia Pass. There's a SmugMug Gallery up with pics now.



Here's the route as a GPX file and a Google Earth file.  A minor rant about my Garmin GPS (60CSX), when you save a route (as opposed to just downloading the "active track") it will cut out most of the detail, and removes timestamps from each point.  So, the GPX and Google Earth files aren't very detailed (but they sure are small).

Mounted a CB antenna today using a Teraflex mounting bracket....  which appears to be about 50x stronger than necessary, but at least I know it's not going anywhere.

The only problem is that the antenna touches the spare tire, so there's not any room if you get bigger tires.  Not really much of an issue though.  Going to tune the antenna tomorrow, hopefully this will fix my CB reception issues.

Sunday morning I drove around the area, then headed back toward home.  I took a little detour and drove around on NF-105 from highway 72 near Magnolia (just south of Nederland) to the Rollins Pass road, just west of Rollinsville.  A few challenging sections on 105, it's a nice drive.