Morgans wrote:
"john smith" wrote
Also, purchase extra guy line. Once you get your tent set up as per the
directions, use the extra pegs and guys at each attach point on the rain
fly.

Depending on the layout of the campsite, it might also be a good idea to
tie some ribbons onto the guy lines for visibility. The hardware store
sells wide yellow tape with "CAUTION" printed on it and narrow pink tape
with no printing; cutting some 1' (30cm) pieces and tying one or two onto
each guy line helps keep people from tripping over them.

Optional protection for the Styrofoam can be light plywood (is any of
it really light?) or a roll of duct tape covering the foam.

I *like* this idea. Some of the foam insulation board has a foil facing
on one side, which won't provide too much protection from dents but will
help keep your pimp-my-cooler from shedding little foam spheres all over
the place.

If you are going to carry loose stuff, carry it in some roughneck, or
Tupperware type of waterproof storage boxes.

In the US, Home Depot is having a sale on storage stuff; some of it
doesn't appear to be that cheap to me, but the shoebox-sized containers
are $1.29 each right now.

Don't forget a roll of duct tape. Every air mattress has as its goal in
life to spring a leak.

I have lots of electrical gadgets I need to keep charged, so I take a
couple gel cell 7 Ahr batteries made into a pack, to charge all of my
stuff.

I've done this before and it works well. That particular size is about
$15-$20 each at your local electronics distributor (*NOT* Radio Shack)
or from a mail-order place like Mouser or Digi-Key. That size comes
with both 3/16" and 1/4" push-on terminals; get the 1/4" terminals if
you can as the mating connectors are much easier to find. Put a
reasonable automotive fuse of 10 to 20 A on the output of the battery.

To charge them, the best way is to use a 120 V charger that is made for
it. Charging them from a 12 V vehicle electrical system also works; put
a diode rated at least 3 A and 50 PIV (1N5400 series) between the
vehicle and the gel-cell to keep the gel-cell from discharging into the
vehicle when the engine is at idle or shut down. Clearly it's probably
a bad idea to charge them this way while you're camping next to the
plane, but hooking them up for the flight to the campsite will get a
pretty good charge into them by the time you get there.

If you want to buy one all made up, this is basically what those "jump
starter in a box" things are. If you don't plan to use the jump-start
function, you could remove the heavy cables and save a little weight.

One advantage to the batteries over the motor-generator (besides the
obvious one of total silence) is that if you stow the batteries in an
accessible spot in the plane, and your electrical system quits, you
can plug the handheld air-band radio (and GPS if you have one) into
the batteries and keep on truckin'. I know the radio and GPS will
have their own batteries, but it does provide a backup and/or extended
run time. If you go someplace where shore power doesn't exist, a solar
cell will also let you charge the batteries during the day.

Matt Roberds