"rig". How long have you been setting it up? My entire set up consists of a one mounted VHF and one hand held and one Icom 710 RT with a pactor. I've never gotten around to getting my Ham license but I'm thinking it might be a good idea. A friend of mine and I were bringing his boat up from Mexico when the tuner on his SSB went out. We was a ham happened to find a ham guy who took pity on us and got a bunch of his friends to pass on our position and give us weather prediction passed back from a friend in San Diego twice a day. Apparently our signal was strong enough on the one frequency that someone could almost always hear us. He must have had a lot of friends listening for us. Anyway, every time I run into someone with a set up like you have I think about that trip up the coast and the help we got, By the way, that trip up was a miserable one and the weather really helped.