Whether you call it Refraction or Reflection hardly matters.

What matters is that the wave, in effect, is reflected from an
ionospheric layer at at a particular height, roughly according to
optical laws. Trigonometry Rules!

Since the transmitted 'beam' has a very wide angle in the vertical
plane, the energy returns to earth over an even wider range of
distances.

The 'elevation angle' reported by antenna simulation programs is not
very meaningfull. It contains very little useful information, mainly
because the height of a reflecting layer is unknown at the time of
transmission. Neither is the number of hops known to a particular
destination.
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Reg.