Some times we get surprising results from an aerial, I was on a mountain and living in a container, to be able to get BBC world service during the day I threaded a wire through the vent in the container and ran it to a pole. I had expected to go outside that night to use 2M set to talk to locals, but found I was locked in, and so I connected long wire to my 2 meter radio and tried at a very low wattage to talk to locals.
It worked, it should not have really worked, and was not too good for the radio but my FT290R worked well.
Aerials are odd things specially on receive, I was using a HB9CV and I was told the military were going to transmit TV in the near future, I had a TV for my computer, so tried plugging in the aerial to see what I got, and there was a signal very weak but there, so rotated aerial got it a little better but still poor, anyway dinner time so went to get dinner and walked past a open door to a room and noted he had a TV showing same program but far better, I stopped and enquired, he had left the built in aerial on his TV and I was picking up a signal from his video recorder.
So if the aerial is good for the transmit frequency you may still receive well out of the band the aerial is designed for, again 2 meter this time in the UK, car fitted with halo aerial and 7/8th whip, using a FT290R with hard wired MM 30 watt linear amp I was going to talk to another ham on the way home using side band and compare the two aerials, his aerial was horizontal and as I drove further and further away the halo was doing best, he went for tea as I reached about 50 miles away, but another ham joined in, the first one had left his radio on and I continued back towards North Wales now around 90 miles away and now it seems the first station was hearing me again. However the odd thing was now the 7/8th whip was better than the halo. It seems as distance increases being horizontal or vertical becomes less important and the gain of the aerial is more important.
In Wales the mountains limit distance, but in Suffolk at some times you could get huge distances. All down to weather, however same frequency on the Falklands and where in UK 30 to 300 miles, in Falklands 10 to 30 miles, we rarely heard the East Island but not really that far away, with one exception Port Louis could be heard all over the Islands even with a hand held. Love to know why, but that one settlement had a huge range.
So there are two very different radio contacts, you get the chance contact maybe off the e layer 100's of miles but only once in a blue moon, and the guaranteed contact where what every the weather you can communicate. With RAYNET the latter is important, and we would test where we could reach and often have either a repeater or a person to repeat the messages. Long time ago I used packet radio, because you could use other peoples radio to forward the message you could do really long distances, however you typed the message, put on the kettle, made coffee and then sat waiting for reply, it was like watching paint dry. As internet arrived packet stopped being used.
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