For decent wireless communications in the Southeast US, 40M in the day time, and 80M at night work fairly well.
For all intents and purposes, in the Southeast, a typical repeater range is 50-100 miles (with a few specific exceptions).
You will not be able to communicate from TN to FL solely via repeater.
There are some internet-to-repeater regimes, that allow local use of vhf/uhf radios on one end or the other. Skype works better nowadays.
There are a few select high-power VHF stations the Chattanooga area that can make it to the FL state line under decent conditions, but they have big arrays, high power, and live on SIgnal Mtn, etc. These stations use SSB or CW on VHF to make that haul. Long distance VHF/UHF communications is done (I have 42 states confirmed on 144 Mhz for example), just not with normal equipment and conditions.