Firstly, from any VHF/UHF radio…forget about how many miles, your range is line of sight plus about 10%.
So your friend may be less than a mile away, but if that is in the bottom of a valley, or surrounded by tall buildings, you’re going to have problems.
Re antennas, well you must realise Nagoya’s are the most counterfeited antennas out there, it gets worse when you realise most of them are knock off copies of Diamonds to start with.
I recently bought 5 “Nagoya” antennas, from different suppliers & put them on my analyser …
Two were open circuit…no connection at all from the centre pin…
Another two were clearly fakes, poor quality printing etc, but they did “Work” just not on the 2m & 70cms bands they were supposedly designed for…so only 1 actually worked anything like the original Nagoya i bought back in the mid 90’s.
A point to note, i bought a cheap Baofeng a couple of years ago and it’s dual band aerial is excellent so don’t be so quick to discount manufacturers stock antennas.
Oh and yes power lines often cause issues if they’re close enough but it depends on many things, the frequencies in use, voltages and frequency of the lines etc, but every country has its own regulations about interference & its unlikely the power lines near you are not compliant, chances are hundreds of radio users locally would’ve noticed and reported their issues to the authorities to get resolved.
I’d try the same experiment from different locations, can you get to the roof?
Does your building have, for example, those reflective, silvered windows?
Lots of things could be the issue. Trouble is we get spoiled by the cell phone network and think radio is going to be the same…well it could be if we had phone type repeaters every couple of miles…but uhf radio is not like that, it just takes the guy you want to talk to to be in the shadow of a building and your stuffed.
I’ve worked from Uk to Germany on 1/2 a watt…but am totally unable to work my friend 3 miles away on 50 watts, some days i can chat to a friend 30 miles away with no difficulty, others absolutely nothing…that’s radio for you…
Good luck and keep experimenting
2 Likes