Hello Kevin,
Interesting thread, thanks for sharing your simulation results.
As Andrew recalled, there was an event devoted to test VHF FM long distance qso ran for three times here in EA.
We choose to do it in VHF FM as we wanted to get reports for as many chasers as possible. Not everybody has a yagi beam at home, but instead, lots of ham have a vertical antenna at home.
We know that horizontal polarization adds a bit of improvement due to ground reflection enhancement, but we did the event in FM vertical.
We tried using some vertical antennas in the summits and also some small yagi.
Of course, distances are improved when using yagi beams.
As we could expect, maximum distances were longer than usual between two operators placed on high mountains end to end.
Line of sight in these cases were overcome by far. Having no tropospheric duct within the large EA land, we got a large number of S2S qso at a range of 300 - 400 Km: quite a long distance and unusual qso! The higher the mountain the longer distances were achieved.
Some ops in summits by the sea shore did find marine tropo enhancement and had qso in the range 500 - 1000 km.
Antenna height?? My proposal is to look for a highest mountain with unobstructed views all 360º aroung and you are gonna enjoy with a great experience!
Don’t really worry too much if you elevate your aerial at 5m or 10m over ground, just look for a reliable support over ground, as going too high makes it difficult to support.
See all data from our two past editions here:
73 de Ignacio EA2BD