The paint job is obvious, but when I think of a Jurassic Park Jeep, certain other things come to mind. The winch Nedry uses, for instance, and the overhead roof lights. The orange aux lights on the rear end, as Muldoon's Jeep drives back to the Visitor Center, having just escaped the T-Rex. And the whip antenna, bouncing back and forth as the group drives from the helipad.
Luckily, the antenna is cheap. Since RadioShack is useless for nearly everything, I ordered a 102" whip from online, along with a Hustler SSM-1 stainless steel ball mount and spring. The antenna on the movie jeeps look like its mounted as high as possible on the tub, directly alongside the roll bar. Unfortunately, that's an extremely hard location to drill into. The ball mount's backing plate fits without any room to spare, so the smart thing to do would be to drill from the inside out, ensuring I could fit the backing plate. But, since I only drill one hole from that side, I had to guess some on the others. And I missed.
Also, hole saws don't work well in a position like this, and I only managed to make it look worse.
Eventually, I decided to file away the metal, slowly enlarging the hole until it was roughly the size I needed, allowing me to bolt the mount in place. Since I can't tie the whip to the light bar, I cut some 550 cord and tied it to the roll bar, leaving a portion outside the top of the door. Tying that to the antenna, the whip is held down, and doesn't hit against the windshield or the FM antenna.
If I'm going to have an antenna on a vehicle of mine, it will be functional, and not just for looks. I was an Air Force radio operator for 10 years, giving me an interest and knowledge of communications. I want more than just a CB. This Jeep will be a full mobile communications rig. A command and control jeep with HF, VHF, and UHF capabilities, letting me listen to weather reports, police and fire dispatches, military and civilian air traffic, and all the amateur radio bands.
If I didn't want the military air traffic, I could get by with just a single radio, the ICOM 7100. But, I spend a lot of time on Air Force bases, have several friends still in the airborne comm community, hold a civilian pilot's license, and spent a little time as an Air Force pilot. (Decided that's not the life I wanted, but that's another story.) Needless to say, MilAir is a requirement for me, and the Kenwood TM-V71A receives those frequencies.
Not wanting the cab littered with radios, I needed a clean way of installing them. The radio needed to be in a place that was out of site, but I didn't want it under the driver's seat, in case I drive through deep water and flood the floor of the jeep. Or if it rains with the top down. Luckily, there's a large empty spot in the dash, under the steering column. A single bolt holds the radio mount to the steering column, and once that trim panel is re-installed, you'd never know the radio was there.
The head unit needed to be accessible, but out of the way at the same time. And I wanted something that looked like it could've been stock. Luckily, the TJ has a large trim piece between the sun visors. Taking a drill and an exacto knife to the plastic, I cut an opening for the remote head unit. It cuts through one of the clips holding the piece in place, along with a stop to prevent it from being pushed into the windshield frame, but the face plate is thick enough to act as a stop and there are 4 other clips to hold the piece in place. With a cable running inside the trim along the side of the frame, it couldn't look much cleaner.
Since the Kenwood doesn't operate on the HF bands that the whip is designed for, I still need another antenna mounted somewhere, and I still need the ICOM radio for the HF operations, leaving me a radio without an antenna, and an antenna without a radio. Good thing this is still a work in progress.
