Vango Gamma 350

A great tent for fair weather the good value.

However, this tent will not stand high winds.

My new tent lasted two nights before most of the fibre glass poles snapped in the incessant winds we get in south Oman in the summer.

Vango Gamma 350 - We decided it was time to buy a new tent after the last festival we attended was a bit wet. Having a 2-man tent with a tiny porch for 2 of us plus all our gear was a bit more cosy than we'd have liked. I suppose they expect you'll be keeping stuff in your car when they tell you how many a tent sleeps. So we bought a 3-man tent with a larger porch area, thinking the porch would give us somewhere to either sit when it was windy and cold or to derobe - removing wet raincoats and wellies when it was raining. This much, it did for us, although I did not notice a large difference in space within the sleeping part of the tent. But having the porch area was a godsend as we got rained on heavily one night and it meant that we didn't end up with wet everything as a result.

We chose the Vango Gamma 350 after research on the web. It was pretty cheap compared to tents of a similar size/durability in the usual high street retail outlets. It was easy to erect, but you really do need 2 people, especially if it is windy, like it was when we were putting it together, and you can even take it down with the inside still attached so as to keep it moderately dry if it's raining when you pack up. It kept the wind off us, it felt very sturdy and we stayed relatively warm and dry.

The only real complaint I would have is that the topsheet of the tent rests a good 4"-6" off the ground. It was fine on one side, but we couldn't get it pulled across to the other side at all, leaving a massive gap. If we'd managed to get it even, there still would have been a giant gap on each side. This meant that the porch area had an exposed bit where not only could everybody see the stuff inside (beer, shoes, folding chairs, bread....) but it got very wet in the night in the rain - we woke up to a giant puddle in the porch. Luckily everything there was either waterproof or in plastic bags. They really need to make the top bit longer to combat this problem.