so i just passed my technician exam last week and im starting to look at handheld radios and honestly there are so many options i dont even know where to start. ive been reading reviews for like two hours and now im more confused than before i started

i know baofeng comes up constantly and the price is obviously hard to argue with but ive also seen people say they're kind of junky or have spurious emissions issues or whatever that means. then theres yaesu and kenwood and icom and those are way more money but i dont know if the difference is worth it when im just starting out

mostly id be using it for local repeaters, maybe some simplex with a friend down the street, nothing crazy. is there a sweet spot here that isnt the cheapest thing possible but also doesnt cost as much as my car payment

congrats on the ticket first of all. ok so the spurious emissions thing with baofengs is real but honestly for just hitting local repeaters its not gonna cause you any real world problems, the issue matters more if you were transmitting near aircraft freqs or something which youre not gonna be doing anytime soon

that said if you can stretch to like 60-80 bucks the Yaesu FT-65 or the older FT-60 are both solid choices and the build quality is just noticeably better, the buttons feel right, the menus make more sense, battery lasts forever on the FT-60 especially. ive had mine for probably 8 years and dropped it more times than i want to admit. still works fine

the kenwood TH-D75 and stuff like that is amazing but thats like 500 bucks and way more radio than you need right now, save that rabbit hole for later when you know what features you actually want

i was in the exact same spot maybe 8 months ago and ended up going with a baofeng UV-5R just to have something to learn on while i figured things out. programming it with chirp was kind of a pain at first but once i got it i had all the local repeaters loaded in like 20 minutes

honestly it does the job and im glad i didnt spend more right away because after a few months i knew way better what i actually wanted in an HT. just my experience anyway