this brings back a lot of memories..........i arrived on rarotonga a week
after a French Dxpidition did, who was set up in the K2KW motel room with
vertical antennas on the beach just as you would imagine. the motel
management said she was sorry, and set me up in a cottage (from the same
motel) on the other side of the island for me and my venerable HW-16, now
connected to a 400 foot long wire to a 100(?) foot high palm tree. i was
across a road to the beach (75 feet from the shore?), but could on 160m
easily hear the USA 579 two hours before sunset
Receiving is virtually always a matter of signal-to-noise ratio in the space
around the antenna. The only cases where more antenna efficiency helps is
when the external signal **and external noise** is so weak it is near system
internal noise.
High conductivity earth can actually hurt S/N ratio because it extends
ground wave far more than it changes higher angle signals.
Transmitting is a different story, if lower angles are used. I doubt,
however, it is ever close to 10-20 dB unless it is groundwave propagation.
I'm sure people somewhere have actual numbers on that.
73 Tom
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