Rod couldn’t make it all the way to Portland driving his big rig without timing out, so he had to stop just north of Salem, Or. We tried different bands and modes to make the contact. 2m SSB is what worked for us.
I was barely hearing him throw out CW when I was pointing directly south so I had him make multiple calls as I swung the beam around. Then I got the idea of pointing it at some mountains to bounce the signal. We were both surprised that pointing the antenna at Mt Hood gave the best results.
It wasn’t the strongest signal, but I have no doubt that if he was running horizontal (even with no beam), we would have been S9 to each other easily.