I've been following this thread and I did participate in the beginning. I have a Regional Airport about four miles from me.
I use a VHF UHF 800 megahertz ground plane quite high up... About 40 feet. I have three different antennas located on different parts of my roof. Only one of them works on that airports ATIS, not the best reception but clear enough.
Everybody's making qualified statements here and I agree with all of it as indicated by my reactions.
As with any of these situations there are so many variables including topographical environment, surrounding interference, location and characteristics of the antenna, overall conditions in general.
My Aviation monitoring for many many years has been area Helo Unicom over Philadelphia. Any helicopter entering the area announces themselves and communicates with the others. I also monitor 4 different news helicopters all on the same news helicopter coordination frequency so when they are hovering over a scene they can maneuver with each other and of course gossip about their news desk and share all of the news information they have with each other lol.
Nobody's right or wrong in this discussion, there are just so many variables.