Drawbacks here are few and far between, but our biggest gripe with the Skydome is that it doesn’t deliver the level of wind resistance advertised. Coleman claims the Skydome is tested to withstand 35 mph winds, but several owners have reported poles snapping under milder conditions. We’ll also point out that although the Skydome is available in 2, 4, and even 6-person sizes, coleman sleeping bags all models of the tent stick to a single door/single vestibule construction. We’d love to see a back door added (especialy if it comes with a second vestibule in the future), but for now we’re more than happy to live with a single door at this price. The rainfly only covers the roof and top portion of the tent, and has built-in guy lines for staking into the ground.
For waterproofing, look for 1000mm coating and/or their WeatherTec System. Weight will vary a lot depending on whether you’re looking for small 2-person tents for backpacking or a huge 10-person tent for car camping. The season rating will usually be 3-season, meaning that it’s appropriate for use in spring, summer, and fall but won’t stand up to winter conditions. The number of occupants (aka “sleep capacity”) can be a little tricky with any brand of tents. If you’re going to have a lot of gear, or just need more room for a family tent, always up-size the number of people. For example, a family of four campers should go with a 5- or 6-person tent instead of a 4-person tent.
The tent’s floor area is 244.3 ft² (22.7 m²), and the porch adds 75.3 ft² (7 m²). Because of such a size, I have included it also into my list of extra large family camping tents. I have been using a marmot tent but want a bigger tent for family car camping. I understand the quality of these tents are not what they used to be and we don’t want to risk broken poles or worse water leaking in. The “Skydome™” variants of dome tents are designed to provide “20%” more head room.
To evaluate the small tents in real-world situations, we took them first to Greggs Hideout, on the Arizona side of Lake Mead. During our tests in this area, temperatures reached upwards of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and at night, as the sands cooled, whipping windstorms kicked up around us. It got so hot one afternoon that we spent the day taking shifts in the car, cooling our photography equipment while monitoring coleman tents ourselves for signs of heatstroke and dehydration. If tents can withstand those conditions, they’ll withstand just about anything. We also wanted self-standing tents, which stay up on their own before you stake them down. Even with a self-standing tent, ideally you should stake down each corner securely; in some crowded campgrounds, however, finding a flat spot with soil soft enough to do that can be difficult.
The reason is that they build them separately for the EU market and for the US market. So the former are huge and they typically can accommodate far more than 6 people. The Mineral King 3 and the Tungsten 4 have similar tent-body profiles and are nearly identical in setup, except that the Tungsten 4 uses two brow poles instead of one to support its fly. Like the Mineral King 3, the Tungsten is a largely mesh dome tent with a tape-seamed polyester bathtub floor, which is highly water resistant. Neither tent experienced any ground leaks during testing, either under rainy conditions or when we soaked the tents and the ground underneath them with a garden hose. Beyond their general size, the tents in our test group were very different from one another, with a wide array of pole configurations and window, door, and roof designs.