Is there a way to listen to a repeater that is out of range (45 miles)?
I have an engineer friend who says I have to have a ground on both ends of the coax or the coax will act like a antenna and it will mess up performance.
Is there a way to listen to a repeater that is out of range (45 miles)?
If you could do this ...it would not be out of range.

VHF and UHF are LINE OF SIGHT radio...
basically you must be able to 'see' the receiver antenna...
DIRT is a bad conductor of radio signal and the curvature of the earth,Hills,mountains all will BLOCK your radio signal
when they get between you and the receive antenna.The earth is not flat and for two guys on foot and "flat" ground,
the limit that you can talk with VHF/UHF is about 5 to 7 miles and higher power does little to help as dirt is good at
getting in the way.(So being mobile is not so much better than hand held except for a bit of antenna efficiency.
To talk farther,the antenna on one or both ends need to be higher to see farther ...How high??
Using the line of sight calculator we see NOTE that when you include a repeater in the middile,the height of the repeater is the limiting factor...though you will not use repeaters much in SECRET as most repeaters cost big money and club membership helps pay that cost.
You will also find the value of community with clubs/repeaters and being know to others as you won't get far with no one at the other end.
BOTH antennas at 6 feet give a range (due to curvature of earth) of 6 miles
One at 6 feet and one at 30 feet (typical base to hand held or mobile) 11 miles
Repeaters are placed in high spots for a reason (a 200 foot tall repeater) 23 miles
The tallest repeater in my area is at 1000 feet (up on a TV station tower) 48 Miles
At longer range (15 mile plus) path loss will begin to also limit how far you can talk so at that point power will help,though not
as much as you may think..IE TEN TIMES the power will NOT double the range ...though when 'they ' have noisy signal the
power increase will help clear up you readability .
VHF and UHF are used for LOCAL communications for a reason as ,on earth base stations, they are limited.
As co-holder (it takes two) of the world record over land VHF record ,( NW Louisiana to central Maine) I know a bit about getting VHF to work ,though a lot of LUCK was involved.
Line of sight calculator:
http://www.qsl.net/kd4sai/distance.htmlYour second ? of a GROUND , NO it is not helpful or even beneficial for your antenna.Though the ferrite bead IS a good thing for the reasons you gave with RF interference.
And reading ahead I see SCW suggest a YAGI and while this helps ,you need height above ground with the yagi to get best results and a rotator as the YAGI received in one direction best (though ,one direction may be all you want)