Well I am going to be unusually kind today, since it is Sunday and also because I am going to show some intelligence here. So everyone listen up - because I am only going to do this one time.

I am not going to fight over who invented radio, or the different types of modulation scheme's - since the days of spark gap transmitters.

I tried to post some relevant information - but it seemed to get lost in the jumble.

The bottom line is - 3rd world countries and places such as the Soviet Union and their sattelite countries does not understand how communications works - to the extent that people in the free world does - because when you live in a communist society you are told what to think and how to think and so you cannot think for yourself.

When the day comes when someone emancipates you and you are free and all of a sudden there is no one telling you how to think or what to say - your mind goes beserk and you just start thinking about things that no one has thought about in 50 years - because even a infant has to crawl before it can walk and those people are so far behind the times it will take them a certain period of time to readjust to the way the rest of the world operates and so we have to be kind to people who were not born and raised in the USA and thinks that they are the worlds leading source of all information and that everything published on the internet is factual.

The Sattelite one was the one that really got me to thinking.
There is nothing in outer space for the signals to bounce off of - so they travel millions of miles in just a couple of seconds and you have to wonder if there is some other form of intelligence on another planet several galaxies away that is monitoring our simple form of communications - and probably laughing at us for what we say and how we act and what we do.
Rock n roll music is probably the most entertaining of all the types of transmissions we make - because it doesn't make much sense when some rapper repeats the same thing over and over again and other musicians plays the same 3 chords over and over again and people pays millions of dollars to buy their albums and listen to them at concerts or that we would allow someone to play advertising over the radio and not turn it off or turn the dial to another frequency.

Or that some ham would be willing to spend 10's of thousands of dollars to buy a transceiver that does the same basic thing as a AM radio you can buy in any Walmart or Goodwill for a couple of bucks.

When you crank up the power, it allows the person on the other end to use a smaller antenna - hence the people who buys or builds the big towers and the big beam antenna's would think that their investment would allow them global communications on a daily basis - and still we have not gotten past the fact that all reliable communicatiosn is LOS - even 100 years later...

The OP wanted to debate the fact that some antenna's works best when we include some type of ground. Yes a good vertical transmitting antenna includes some type of ground to keep the signal from warming the clouds and being wasted.
A beam antenna does not have a physical ground, yet still works - maybe the ground reflections helps the signals to travel further.
But we all know that effective communications requires the antenna to be as high as possible.
Only once you get to what is it 38,000 miles one antenna will transmit to one hemisphere - or is it what ever part of the earth you can see and will transmit no further.
That is the point of diminishing returns.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/f...ection-12.html

http://www.keytelemetering.com/9600_Antenna.htm