After passing my Technician test last Friday, my ticket came through the ULS this afternoon. I immediately fired up the HT radio I bought in my apartment and tried to make some contacts over 146.52 and 446.00 simplex but couldn't get through to anybody on either.

Thinking it may be because I was broadcasting from an apartment, I drove up to a nearby peak (Vollmer Peak in the Bay Area) to try from that vantage point. I want to get into SOTA anyway.

Even from the Peak, I couldn't make any contacts, although I did hear just a faint whisper above the noise in response to one of my transmissions. For the most part all I heard was noise the entire time; the only exception is I switched to a repeater frequency at one point and heard some morse clear as day, so the HT isn't totally defective.

This is what I think it is: the HT I'm working with is a UV-5R with a Nagoya 771 antenna. I understand that this model can easily be overloaded by nearby FM frequencies? I'm still not totally sure on what exactly that means. This could be even worse because I suspect that the UV-5R may actually be a counterfeit (though I'm fairly sure the antenna is legit). What exactly causes this overloading problem, and how can I find an affordable (<$100, preferably no more than ~$80) HT that will allow me to make contacts? Am I diagnosing this problem correctly?

Edit: Thank you everyone for the wonderfully polite responses to my extremely newbie questions.