I am trying to put my time and money into something that will work -- and that doesn't include trying to punch a 2m signal through a couple hundred feet of hilltop ridge, twice, between me and the nearest repeater on the club's net.
However, since I know I can't transmit through terrain, I'm trying to find out what will work.
If you don't see how an HT can work from inside a vehicle, you've obviously never tried it. Works fine; I can get full quiet (with 8W rated output on 2m on a Nagoya 771) on a repeater nearly 20 miles away (well up a 500 foot radio tower). Yes, an external antenna would be better; I'm working toward that to go with the 65W car-mount 2m rig I plan to install. Meanwhile, I don't claim to fully understand how a 2m signal can squeeze out of a Fiesta, but it does.
And no, the 10m repeater I was thinking about isn't CSQ; it's CTCSS aka PL tone.
Now, if someone wants to come down to my house (roundly 60 feet below average terrain around here) and try to hit the repeaters I'm after, I'm all ears. Or if you can suggest how to build a mast high enough to bother for $50 or so (if I can do that, i can build a Yagi for similar money or less and have some chance of getting over those ridges). The last mast I saw for sale, however, was far out of my budget.
Otherwise, my current priority for the home shack is getting my HF rig up and running, and its antenna up, because 2m isn't my primary interest.