There really aren't many reliable options better than FRS to the non-ham. CB is the wild west and getting further than a few miles is hard unless conditions are good even if you can cut through the hookers and retards. I put it off for a long time, but if you are not an idiot you can pass your tech exam with about 3 nights studying for about an hour each night after reading the study guide. Once you are a tech, you can use a $30 Chinese radio to use local repeaters to talk as far as a few hundred miles. I recently talked to
@htperry from almost the VA line to his house in Charlotte, sounded like he was right beside me (we used the HEARS repeater network which stretches hundreds of miles). My local repeater is about 20 miles from me and I can talk to about anyone in a 60-75 mile diameter circle to that tower on the same cheap radio with a 10" antenna. Radio to radio I have tested even in the mountains to 4 miles + and did not find the outer limit of reliability (talking $30 Baofeng radios here with 10" antennas). Mobile ham from a car or set up to be portable with a good antenna and 25-50W can get you further. 2M and 440 are very useful and reliable.
Look, I know you want what you want but it is a unicorn.
The only other option is actually not legal, but most of the Chinese radios will do FRS/MURS/Marine and GMRS at the full 5W instead of the tiny wattage of the actual FRS radios. You could be real careful and use them on these freqs but it is technically against the law as they are not type accepted.
Spend the TINY amount of time it takes to get your tech ticket and I guarantee you won't regret it.
