@ogb
A high antenna would be wonderful but only have trees around our yard maybe 40 feet high max. That is an ok height for higher frequencies, like 10 meters (28 MHz band) and 20 meters, (14 MHz band) but 80 meters, (4 MHz band) those dipoles want to be more like 100 feet high. That is not going to happen🙂 so working 4 MHz what happens is the transmitted signal tends to go more or less straight up in the air which limits the range you can talk.
The other problem is we are in a solar cycle minimum, the 11 year cycle.
It looks like we may be entering the next uplift in cycle so propagation will slowly improve. The solar cycle effects the ionosphere, low cycle means the ionosphere is basically transparent to RF especially from 14 MHz up. But an active solar cycle with lots of sunspots means the ionosphere is like a mirror so a signal hitting the ionosphere from underneath (it hangs out around 100 miles up) and signals can bounce up from antenna to ionosphere, back down to Earth which reflects the waves back up to the ionosphere and during really high solar cycles, lots of sunspots, that signal can actually go all the way around the planet sometimes 3 times around, causing what is known as round the world echo, since the path length is roughly 25,000 miles once around Earth that results in a delay or echo of around 100 milliseconds or so and you can hear that in the signal.
At 50 MHz and up there is another path through the troposphere and in Australia a new tropo path record was set at near 5000 km which is amazing but not reliable. Anyway that's the 50 cent tour of ham radio.