Which repeater are you trying to hit and have you tried any of the UHF repeaters in the county? I sometimes have better luck hitting the UHF repeaters when using the short stock Baofeng rubber duck.
https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeate...id=39&loc=Lake
Which model do you have... as far as I know the UV-5R only has 2 power settings 1 & 5 Watts. My BF-8HP has a third setting for outputs of 7 W on UHF and 8 W on VHF.
Yes, manual programming is a PITA.
jr