frequency modulated (FM) voice communications on VHF and higher frequencies signals are line of sight as they don't readily bounce off the ionosphere (specialized military transceivers bounce off ionized tails of micro meteors) and "skip" as the lower frequency HF signals do...they travel on into Space... due to the curvature of the Earth you may not be actually inside the cone of coverage of the transmitter's antenna... your receiving antenna must be elevated high enough to do so... the signal strength inside the cone can be increased by a Yagi multi element di-pole antenna, where each of the parallel elements induces a little more signal voltage and is very directional...and there are amplifiers that boost signal...

I don't know your age, but pre cable TV antennas were Yagi... with several distinct lengths of elements pre cut for a particular TV channel frequency (ABC,CBS,NBC)... and a smaller 8 or so element nose for the UHF/VHF networks... an antenna rotor was used to orient them