I agree Dan, something about the water, I have the ocean 150 feet to the east, and the Pamlico Sound to the west, Antenna mast's are in salt marsh, I'd mention some of the places I hear signals from but no one would believe me,lol. My guess is extended ground wave, I can talk to S america with better reception than my cell phone,lol. Only downside of this huge amount of water is with it comes a lot of ground noise also, and I mean a lot. Beams help some but not a lot. I have heard stations in S America talking to you, but I have no luck raising you about 50 miles away, go figure,lol. 73'sI actually park at a spot where my bumper hangs over the ICW. The ICW, or rather a bay along on its path, is about 6’ directly below my bumper.
I’ve done this before and I’m not sure it made a difference to be honest. Just being at the water seems to make a huge difference. I can be 1/4 mile away and barely hear anything, and then everything is S9 and traffic in every freq in my radio as I pull up...straight back to nothing when I pull away.
As we sometimes post about no propagation (title of thread), it’s just not like that here. There is international propagation to some extent nearly every day here. I typically spend only a couple hours a day and have logged 140 international contacts in the past 3 weeks...all from my mobile.
Ocean One Cape Hatteras