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Product Description
Designed to be the best double-wall solo shelter supported by trekking poles, the X-Mid is the brainchild of Dan Durston, an experienced thru-hiker and established member of the ultralight community. It aims to solve the common issues seen in trekking-pole-supported tents: Most are single-trekking-pole pyramids, which lack headroom, or overly complex multi-pole designs, which are tedious to pitch Read More
Most tents provide the HH spec for the new fabric, but that's a nearly useless spec because waterproof coatings can wear dramatically such that the new spec tells you almost nothing about how the coating really holds up. Lots of coatings can test at 5,000 or even 10,000mm but they can also be very thin and easily abraded or cracked so they might only test at 500mm after a few weeks of use (imagine a super thin layer of plastic where it is very waterproof but also easily damaged vs something thicker).
Consider why so many rain jackets leak even with impressive 20,000mm specs. It's because the coatings/membranes are so thin or poorly impregnated that the coating degrades rapidly even though it was great when new. It's the same thing with tents, but instead of recognizing the problem (degrading coatings) people look for ever higher new specs .What you really want are coatings that last.
Because of this, with the X-Mid we provide the spec for heavily worn fabric. The new fabric actually tests much higher than 2000mm. I'm not sure how high because our testing maxes out at 3500mm, but it's higher than that. We wear test it to simulate years of use, and then unlike anyone else, provide the spec for that worn fabric since that more accurately represents how it will perform years down the road.
To illustrate that, here is a graph showing the HH of the X-Mid fabric (green) over time (machine generated wear cycles) against some popular competitors fabrics. Note that 3500mm is the max of the testing equipment, so results there are actually higher. A key point here is that several of these fabrics are higher than the X-Mid at the beginning (0 wear cycles) and would test at >5000mm, but all of them are lower than the X-Mid by the end because the X-Mid coatings are heavily impregnated.
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So you don't really need 3000 mm - you need about 600 mm to be higher pressure than rain can ever exert or 1000mm to be safe. If someone says 3000mm is the minimum, it's because they're trying to get a fabric that will still test about 1000mm when used. So at >3500mm new and about 2000mm heavily used, the X-Mid fabric is reliably waterproof.
Either get some hiking poles or some adjustable tent poles from another company. To me the hiking poles are so worth it. Apart from taking the strain off the knees when going downhill they prevent my hands from swelling on long hikes and you can use them to roll out the kinks and knots in your legs.
How well does this tent stand up to rain and wind? I am in Scotland where it rains alot and storms can whip up from no where. Don't want to be flying a kite instead of being tucked inside nice a cosy and dry.
The X-Mid is truly designed to be very weather capable and not merely hyped as such, so it has genuinely useful features like a full coverage fly that extends to the ground (to block wind and rain splatter), fly first pitch (to keep the inner dry) and lots of other harsh weather capable features like dual large vents (that can shut to block wind and spindrift), peak guylines (to better anchor it high winds), protected entryways (so rain doesn't drip on the floor), thick waterproof fabric coatings (posted HH specs are after wear testing, which is far more rigorous than the new fabric specs other use) etc. The X-Mid is as good as it gets for rain performance in a 3 season tent. It's not a 4-season tent for 100km/hr winds but lots of folks over the UK and Scotland are using them successfully in pretty stiff winds.
I recommend just covering the floor of the tent and not the vestibules. That's lighter and avoid risk that the groundsheet creeps out from under the fly and collections. Below are the dimensions you need. Both ends are the same (aside from being a mirror image).