This cannot be stressed enough. People routinely talk to the space station using 5 watt radios and it’s more than 200 miles away, but there’s nothing in the way.
I agree. It would be nice if I could get that kind of line-of-sight. But I can't. Some of us just can't get an antenna up above the 100'+ trees around us.
It depends on the radio. Some radios come with very good stock antennas. That being said, I've used dual band VHF/UHF ham antennas on my GMRS radios and they worked just fine. No doubt a GMRS specific antenna will work better but the dual bands have worked just fine for me.
I have that same radio. I used the Set software to select the frequency range and after that I use chirp. Have saved several files with chirp with no problem.
I use the AT-778UV daily. It gets hot but apparently not too hot for the radio. If I ever get time, I'm going to pull the fan out of an old laptop and mount it on the heatsink just for good measure.
It has nothing to do with the brand of radio. It is simply not a GMRS frequency and therefore a GMRS radio of any brand will not transmit on that frequency. Many brands have radios, business or ham, that will transmit on that frequency not just Baofeng.
This is the nature of most of what I hear and take part in where I live. Both GMRS and ham. There are technical discussions about radios, but that seems to be about 30-40% of the time.
And the humidity was through the roof early when we started putting up antennas. We were all drenched is sweat by the time we were done. As the sun burned off the excess humidity and the breeze started, it got much more comfortable. Still hot but bearable.