Yaesu 2800 / Kenwood D710A in an FJ40
Overhead installation for 2M/dual band radios in my Land Cruiser:
Welded a piece of scrap steel on the top of my MetalTech cage when it went together just for this purpose:
Bolted the radio mount to this, using silicone sealer in the holes and under the washers:
Yaesu FT-2800M body mounted:
The power leads and the antenna coax are all routed inside the roll cage. For power supply, I installed a Farkleshop auxiliary fuse block in a Con-Ferr tool box that is right behind the front seats. The fuse block is powered straight from the battery:
Because the hard top on the 40 goes on and off seasonally, I needed to mount an antenna separately from the top, and not on the roll cage. I decided to fab a mount that would go on my spare tire carrier. This is not an ideal location for ground plane, but has more elevation than the front bumper or the side of the body, and I didn't want to drill a hole in my good tub anyway. The mount is going to go here, on top of the receiver mount for the spare tire, so I drilled and tapped three holes for a sturdy mount:
Bent-up some mild steel flat stock; a little trial and error soon had the right angles for the antenna to clear both the spare tire and the tub/hard top and still be level:
Welded up a brace and the mount is finished except for paint:
Mount painted and installed:
Close-up of the heavy-duty (Thick-mount) NMO:
I tried some existing 5/8-wave and 1/4-wave antennas I already had, but there is not enough ground plane for them to tune-up well, so I bought a Larsen 1/2-wave and after a little trimming for length it tuned up nearly perfectly. The Larsen is almost invisible behind the spare tire, yet still has enough elevation above the hard top to perform fairly well:
Not long after completing this installation, I bought a Kenwood TM-D710A dual-band radio, primarily for its APRS capability. Because the D710A uses the same power connection and PL-259 antenna connection as the Yaesu 2800, swapping out the head units between the two is easy, and with a few nylon spacers they can even use the same Yaesu mount. The Kenwood has a detached face plate that cannot be mounted to the head unit, so I mounted it to the front of the roll cage. You can also see that I mounted the mic clip to the roll cage also:
Overall I'm very happy with this installation. On a week-long trip through Hotel Rock, the Abajo Mountains, Dark/Peavine/Ruin Canyons, and the Needles District of Canyonlands, I beaconed APRS the entire trip and was able to hit the Monticello repeater almost all the time, except when down in the canyon bottoms.