I never liked the Amstrads. Back then I had a York JCB 863 which the screwdriver mechanic from over the road (he was "Bikewrecker" in Doodlebug's book of handles and I was "Legal Eagle") had been inside so was probably more like 10 watts than 4 and heavily overmodulated. Later I got a DNT (supertuned) and a Midland I acquired from my Brother in Law and two Cybernet 1000s. Both the DNT and the Midland had nice audio quality. Alas the York was nicked. I also had some little boots in the wrappers, nothing like the big Bremi indoors.

Apart from the Starduster on the house, the best thumpers on the wrappers were a 5 foot distributed load Firestik and a 4 foot top-load Hotrod, and running close behind a Modulator MDX and a KT40 that I had modified. For a while I also had an original Moonraker but some bastard stole that too. Oh, and a Halfbreed. I also had a load of short things for use in the woods on my offroader and a very odd US made 3 foot wirewound that I found in a junk shop and had a lot of fun swring (it being designed for the US frequencies) but it got out not as well as the big wirewounds but better than the whips.

The point about skip is that radiation that goes out too straight up goes out through the magnetic layers. It's the same phenomenon (in reverse) as total internal reflection in optics. That's why there is a minimum skip distance. So not only for groundwave but also for skywave you want a low propagation angle and that's why a 5/8 wave goes further than a half-wave goes further than a 1/4 wave - and a true collinear goes further.