I can’t tell you that a baofeng is gonna outperform any of these radios. I can tell you that I’ve got two of them, a programming cable, a mag mount vhf/uhf antenna, a nagoya antenna, and an antenna I made out of some leftover Romex and a painting pole. All this was well within that budget.

I can also tell you that I, not without some antenna placement experiments, can consistently activate a local repeater from around 15 miles. And have been complimented on audio quality on multiple occasions.

You are not going to find an ht with a rubber duck antenna that’s going to perform the way you’d like. You will need to try out some different things.

Save yourself some heartache and get an sma to BNC adapter for the radios you wanna play with some antennas on and some whatever your antennas have to bnc adapters, get a few antennas instead of another ht, and just try stuff out. Or hell, throw $16 bucks at a gt-5r, they’re clean transmitters now, the build quality is surprisingly good (on mine anyway) and even if it’s hot garbage you didn’t spend a fortune on it.

You will always wonder if you’re screwing things up, you just get better and faster at diagnosing the issue through practice.