so ive been licensed for about three weeks now and everyone keeps telling me to just get a baofeng to start but then other people say dont bother and spend a little more on a yaesu or kenwood. i honestly dont know what to do. my main use case would be local repeaters, maybe some simplex chatting with a friend who just got his ticket too, and eventually i want to get into emcomm stuff with the local ARES group.

the UV-5R is like $25 which seems insane for a radio but i keep reading that the programming is a nightmare and the receive is kinda garbage? then theres the Yaesu FT-65 which looks decent and isnt that expensive either. i also saw the BF-F8HP mentioned a lot which is supposedly better than the basic baofeng but im not sure how much of that is just marketing.

honestly at this point i might just flip a coin. anyone have strong feelings either way? does it actually matter that much for just hitting local repeaters

okay so the baofeng vs yaesu debate has been going on forever and honestly both sides have a point. i started with a UV-5R and it got the job done for hitting the local 2m repeater but the receiver really does pick up a lot of garbage, like youll hear all kinds of intermod in busy RF environments. that said for $25 if you brick it figuring out chirp programming its not the end of the world.

the FT-65 is genuinely a step up though. the menu system is way more sensible and the audio is clearer, both transmit and receive. if your ARES group does any actual deployed operations they might have opinions about what radios they want members running, worth asking them before you spend anything. some groups are pretty particular about it. i know ours strongly prefers radios that can do NOAA weather channels natively because we do a lot of served agency stuff.

if budget allows id honestly say stretch to the FT-65 or even look at a used VX-6R if you can find one in decent shape. waterproofing matters more than people think when youre standing in the rain at a public service event wondering why you didnt spend the extra forty bucks.

i was in the exact same spot like six months ago lol. ended up getting the baofeng BF-F8HP and honestly its fine for what i do which is basically just the same as you described. got chirp figured out in an afternoon with a youtube video, wasnt that bad. the higher power output is kinda nice if youre on the edge of a repeater's range i guess, not sure how much it actually helps in practice but it made me feel better ha

one thing nobody told me — get a better antenna for whatever you buy. the rubber duck antennas that come with basically all these cheap HTs are pretty mediocre, picked up a nagoya NA-771 for like ten bucks and it made a noticeable difference on a couple repeaters i was barely hitting before.