I can't reliably hit the repeater which is about 15 miles away with mine, but I'm in an inner ring suburb, a lot of buildings and interference. I'd imagine if I went on top of an apartment building I'd have no issues. > I built a J-Pole but have not benchmarked it yet. That's pretty cool. I really haven't done anything with radio in awhile, kind of lost interest tbh, but it is nice having the gear just in case. I do turn the handheld on to listen to the 'storm watch' guys during heavy weather. That is somewhat entertaining, but that is about it recently.