Nice setup Philip.

I'm going to look around and get myself a good field-strength meter and play around with some other ways of mounting and demounting my Hustler whip. As you pointed out in your civex pix, the location of the antenna probably affects the directionality. Mounting the antenna on the rear corner of our vehicles probably doesn't offer the best ground plane and the least radiation resistance, and since I'm running QRP, I want to maximize the amount I'm radiating as much as possible without going to a longer wire antenna that will be less convenient to put up. My vice-grip mount is almost instantaneous, so that's going to be hard to beat.