I saw your other thread... I am a GMRS license holder and there is a large number of repeaters linked here in the midwest where I hear people talking all the time, from Indiana to Wisconsin...
As for the 2m stuff, the VHF/UHF FM thingy is the easiest stuff to get started. Why? b/c all the hard work has been done for you so you can use a 15 dollar UV-5R to talk to others... yes, all the real hard work was done at the repeater; the people who put that repeater together had to put a lot of time, effort and money into making it so good that even your CCR 5R can work at 30 miles... Its not that 7 dollar Amazon special antenna that is so good, its the repeater's 700 dollar collinear tuned to near perfection what makes your radio talk to it. There is a lot of skill in building a repeater, and building repeaters in VHF/UHF is only the tip of the iceberg in hams (and I am not a ham, btw)... and into my next point:
As a GMRS license holder, I can tell you from my personal experience that a 5-7 mile reliable GMRS repeater (emphasis in "reliable") is going to require a very high tower and at least 25W, potentially more, along with quality feedline (heliax) don't even bother with cheap LMR400 due to PIM, in fact a lot of towers won't even let you use LMR on the tower.... you'll need quality cavities, a combiner, which are far better than the average 3dB insertion loss mobile duplexer (3dB IL means your signal is halved even before it gets to the receiver!!)... and a potentially really good antenna like a Commscope DB-222 if you live in a really hilly area. Why such expensive antenna you might ask? well, b/c most of these cheap Chinese vertical antennas will be sending all those watts straight to the clouds due to poor radiation patterns.. been there done that. Nothing in RF that is reliable comes cheap.
Then, if you want a portable-to-repeater reliability at 7 miles, even inside buildings, expect to pay very dearly for it. If you live in a hilly area, then you'll need a ridiculously high tower and an excellent radiation pattern antenna so you won't have dead zones.... to top it off, if you live in a highly congested RF area in the UHF region (TV stations, etc), you'll find out that most of the cheap radios won't work well with a "thrown together" repeater due to receiver desense, so your 7 mile range will be utopia to achieve with UV-5Rs burned to GMRS on a K1 repeater controller box.
G.