My current vehicle installation
After my first installation (details here) of ID5100 / IC7100 (swappable) in the vehicle I decided to have a HF radio permanently installed. Previously I had to remove the IC-7100 from the shack and put it in the car which was fine for long trips but not so good when I wanted to get a few SOTA contacts whilst out shopping on a weekend.
The Yaesu FT-875D is ideal as it is small enough and easily removed to take on a SOTA summit if the it's not too far too walk.
This is the view from the "cockpit":
And here is the messy installation in the back:
A more detailed view:
The LDG YT-100 is an automatic HF tuner which is required due the narrow bandwidth of the vertical HF antenna.
The HF antenna is located on roof rack with short RF strap to the main vehicle body:
Don't be fooled by the aluminium roof rack - it is made of anodised components which have no (or very bad) electrical connection to each other or to the car body. Electrically this antenna only has the aluminium plate which holds the base and the strap to the car body.
Although the RF strap is only 250mm (10") long, it's impedance is still a bit high for low frequencies (80mt + 40mt). This high impedance shows up when tuning the antenna tip - the tip is too short to get 1:1 SWR in the middle of the bands. The YT-100 tuner overcomes the SWR problem, but it does affect the efficiency of the antenna.
If I take this antenna and put it on a chassis mounted base everything tunes up OK.
Nevertheless, numerous DX contacts to Europe (on 20mt with 59 signal reports) have been made from this vehicle installation.
Driver side (left in this picture): UHF CB antenna
Passenger side (right in pic): 2mt and 70cm
Roof rack: HF antenna 80-6mt
The HF antenna is the Amateur model of the Bushranger Multitap made by Bushcomm.