Extreme Range

Skywave - Wikipedia

 

No repeaters...you're just hearing skip propagation. As we're at or nearing the bottom of the 11-yr solar cycle, skip happens most frequently during the summer months, and less so, or not at all during the other seasons. At the peak of the cycle (6 or 7 years from now) the band will be open nearly all day, making local communications difficult at best.

 

Propagation, skip, road noise. Inversions are awesome on VHF. I've talked hundreds of miles using 5 watts on 2 meters. Like @rabbiporkchop said, wiki skywave and you can see how some forms of RF shoot through some layers of the atmosphere, while others are reflected back to the surface of the earth, to be picked up by your transceiver. Some signals might make multiple hops across oceans. I've been around radios for 20 years, and it still fascinates me to this day.

 

Additionally, antennas radiate mostly perpendicular so if you lay the antenna flat it'll go up and be more likely to catch skip. Less about power and more about weather conditions.

 

This is the best I ever did Via ground-wave mobile-to-mobile.