Radio reception I get good reception up close and long distance, but in between I cant get any reception. Anyone have any advice?

What it sounds like to me is you have experienced what is called "skip". The CB radio becomes very crowded with people talking. Noticeably close range and also distant, like as in another state or even country. Skip is caused by sunspot activity. every 11 years sunspot activity increases to a peak in the cycle. When this happens solar flares can occur and also cause radio outages.Why because radio waves and solar flares are both electromagnetic waves.Except the solar flare is more powerful and knocks out the less powerful radio waves. (yes solar flares and even light are radio waves too). back to skip... The weirdness of it all when skip happens radio waves at long distances come is as a local station would, quite powerful, but soon will go away. It seems to start over in the eastern part of the US if you live in the Western part and rolls around down through the southern US and back over to Hawaii and Japan. All this will take all day. You can talk to anybody you can hear if the conditions are right and you have a good antenna setup. so you were hearing "skip". look into it and learn more about it. I have experience with "skip" the reason I know. As Don mentioned even mountains can inhibit the radio wave at this frequency. But CB is not line of sight. line of sight occurs when the frequency is much higher such as UHF. Cb has ground wave and sky waves as it leaves the antenna. The directions it goes depends on the antenna setup and design. If you have a beam antenna the radio wave is narrowed and can then become directional. A regular 1/4 wave antenna , vertical basically goes in all directions. The reason you can bounce off the ionosphere. In order for the CB radio wave to go long distance it has to hit the ionosphere and then reflect at an angle back down to the person on the other end. So sunspot activity messes with the gases in the ionosphere to allow this to happen. now here is also a bonus to the question,,,,, If you listen to an AM radio in the broadcast band 540 KHz to say 1705 KHz you notice it goes farther at night. why? here is why. during the day the ionosphere is lower to the Earth, the radio wave hits it and the angle after it hits is very small and it comes back to Earth not too far from where it started. Now when the sun goes down, the ionosphere raises, now the angle after the radio wave hits the ionosphere is much larger and presto.... longer distance at night.

Cb radio is line of sight. If there is a hill in the way, or some other kind of structure it will block the radio waves.

But also, radio waves, will bounce of the ionosphere and come back down.

So whats probably happening is...

You hear people close because they are near. You can't hear some one some what far away because of hills or something, but you talk to people far away because the are within range of the radio waves bouncing back down to them