I had about a 100-foot long wire maybe 35 feet in the air. You can see a photo of my monitoring corner here taken in the late 1960s or early 1970s (scroll to bottom of page):
http://johndenver.ca/The setup worked well but tuning that portable was tiring since there was almost no bandspread. You had to move the main tuning or fine tuning a very small amount to change stations. A friend and I used to dream about having a dial you could rapidly turn with large bandspread and with a digital readout. Basically what every desktop SW receiver has now.
But starting simply really makes you appreciate the better receivers when you finally get one.