Sorry about post location Mike. 

Definitely UHF with a repeater. Even better- a tower along with the repeater. In '98 we put up a 70' tower along with a Kenwood repeater/base w/ phone interconnect in our shop. I'm thinking the $4500 range rings a bell. On our farm where it is flat in the valley we have a 40 mile radius with that setup. To the east of our farm there are some decent hills and we are limited to about 25 miles whilst going in that direction.

The system works very nice with our marginal cell phone coverage. We can contact anyone on our farm with the push of a button. We can make calls for parts, etc. and anyone who needs to reach one of us only need call the shop number and can almost always get a hole of the person they are looking for. The bad part is nothing is private- anyone with a scanner or a radio can listen in. Some days though....it is nice to get away from all of the hubub that the radio tends to promote.

As has been said before, best suggestion is to find a GOOD dealer. Talk to neighbors or a local business with two-way radios to get a feel for who is the best. In our case we have two local dealers. One is VERY good and the other tends to do some questionable things and often times puts people on the same frequency too close together. Also the suggestion for the repeater is correct. If you don't have your own location where you can get the antenna up high, via a grain leg, new tower or other, find someone you can rent space from. When my cousins were still in the trucking business they did just that and were set up right so that they could reach over a 120 mile radius.

As far as brands go, I like Kenwoods the best. Start yourself out with a repeater, 2-3 radios and a couple hand held units and build from there as you see fit. Once your dealer puts you in a common model radio, you can buy used from Ebay cheap enough. Warning though- you can get burned doing this....it happened on my last purchase and now I'm gunshy.