Thanks for the suggestions everyone -
Will reply in detail later but suffice it to say I'm testing at the moment with a quick and dirty half wave dipole, since I have room for it and I don't have the resources to put up an inverted V yet. I'll figure that out at some point. But in the meantime, this dipole gets my signal a fair ways out, by which I mean about 2 miles. Ha, some optimization will be in order.
Of course I do wonder what it's doing skywave wise.