[NN5I]

Congrats on the shiny new rig! Soon enough, you'll be poking holes in it anyway, but only after it gets to where it needs washing.

A through-the-glass antenna ought to work well, as long as there's no conductive coating on the glass -- which is probably the case, because they wouldn't likely use the mesh and a conductive coating.

The mesh itself may be conductive, and might interact with the antenna to detune it if it's right next to the glass-with-mesh. In that case, lean the antenna away from the mesh about 30 to 45 degrees. This will affect transmitted and received signals surprisingly little. The cosine of 30 degrees is about 0.866, a negligible loss of 0.62 dB. Even at 45 degrees, cos 45 degrees = 0.707, a loss of 1.5 dB, which is 1/4 of an S-unit, so it's negligible. At 60 degrees it gets noticeable, 3 dB or half an S-unit.

If the mesh is conductive, it may reduce your signal toward starboard, just by being in the way. Forward or aft, no. To port, it may even increase it.

I've had good luck with through-the-glass antennas on the windshields of classic Thunderbirds and also on Corvettes, back when I could afford neat cars. Let us know your results.

LATER -- Oops, I allowed an interesting technical error to creep into the discussion above. Tilting the antenna reduces the signal (both ways) because it misaligns the receive and transmit antennas, no matter which is which. It reduces the voltage induced in the receive antenna by the cosine of the angle of misalignment. But since nothing you do to the transmit antenna changes the impedance of the receive antenna, the current in the receive antenna changes by the same ratio. Thus the power in the receive antenna is reduced by the square of the cosine. So at each angle the loss from tilt, in dB, is exactly twice what I stated above. At 30 degrees it's about 1.24 dB, at 45 degrees it's 3 dB, at 60 degrees it's 6 dB. This still shows that tilting the antenna doesn't hurt much; at 60 degrees it's still only 1 S-unit.