Thank you for the suggestions.
If you want to look at our code it is located in read-only mode here:
http://www.firebears.org/hg Suggestions are welcomed.
We have our radio mounted about 4 feet high in the open with polycarbonate on one side to attach to our mast. We have never had an issue achieving connection and I didn't see where the avg trip time would speed up when the radio's open side was facing the FMS versus when it was facing away from the FMS.
We do a fair amount of system.out.println statements in our code, plus watching variable values on the dashboard.