so ive been licensed about 3 months now (tech class) and ive just been using my elmers old radio to check into the local 2m net but i really need to get my own HT at some point. i went on one of the big ham radio sites and just got completely lost. theres like a hundred different ones and i dont even know what features actually matter vs what's just marketing fluff.

my main use case is probably just local repeaters, maybe some simplex if theres anyone around here to talk to, and i want to be able to program it without too much headache. budget is somewhere in the $60-150 range i guess. someone at the club meeting mentioned the baofeng uv-5r but then someone else kind of made a face when they said it and i wasnt sure if that was like a quality thing or just a snobbery thing lol. would really appreciate any thoughts from people who actually use these things day to day

haha yeah the baofeng face is definitely a combination of both things depending on who you ask. honestly for getting started on local repeaters a uv-5r or the slightly newer uv-82 will do exactly what you need. i ran a uv-5r for my first two years and it worked fine. the main complaints are receiver selectivity isnt great so if you're near a busy rf environment you might get some interference, and the stock antenna is pretty mediocre so grab a nagoya na-771 or something similar and youll notice a real difference right away.

if you want to spend a bit more and get something that feels a lot more solid and has better receiver performance, the yaesu ft-65r or the wouxun kg-uv9d are both in your budget range and worth considering. the yaesu in particular is pretty straightforward to program without even needing the software, which some people appreciate. chirp works with most of these anyway so programming isnt usually the nightmare it used to be. just buy the programming cable when you get the radio, dont try to make one yourself like i did the first time

i was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up going with a yaesu ft-4xr because someone here recommended it and im glad i did. its not fancy at all but it just works. battery lasts forever compared to what i expected, fits in my pocket, and i havent had any issues with it on the local repeaters. only thing i'll say is read the manual before you try to program it by hand because the menu system is a little weird at first but once you get it its fine.