I like having my panel up at the top of my tent. I agree that it gives "hps-like" results as my plants are taller than when I was constantly trying to push the light closer.
My light sits about 45" away from the soil line in my tent. From my own perspective, the plants are getting plenty of light. The node lengths are just right in my opinion.
Also, I was bored last night and found a light meter app on the Android play store. It has calibrations for many popular phones and once I found mine, I had some fun checking the light levels of different bulbs in my house.
It gives a reading in lux. I don't know how valuable this unit is to our endeavors, or how accurate a phone's sensors can be... but! There were some nifty observations. It could sense even minute sources of light, such as a small cfl lamp across the room. Maybe 8 lux or so. But it displayed the exponential relationship of light and distance well too. By placing it close to an itty bitty cfl, it was able to register several thousand lux.
So with that in mind, I decided to try it in my tent. Besides giving a readout in "lux," it also tells you the color temperature of light in Kelvin PLUS a general category of the intensity of light, "low light, medium light, high light, sunlight." In all plant relevant areas of my tent, it reads "sunlight." Placing it point blank on my panel registered extremely high lux numbers, but the meter never maxed out at any value. Seems to have quite a range.
Anywho...
I know a phone is probably a horrible light meter, but it's pretty neat to see that even at 45" away, my light still registers as "sunlight" intensity.
