Ground waves are scary, they are in the ground and may harm rabbits.
Yes sky waves, right place at the right time and is getting more and more common.
Seriously I had a qso with a friend out in Washington a few months ago, he was out there to do experiments on a new radio system. In his side he used one of them new 705 radios and here I used a qrp system using a raspberry pi transmitter with a five watt amp and a rtl-sdr receiver with a random piece of wire, this was a 10 minute conversation before I had some clown trying to get into the conversation on his side.
People get all caught up in what needs to be done but it doesn’t take a lot to communicate.