so i passed my tech exam about three weeks ago and ive been lurking on a few local repeaters with a borrowed baofeng just to listen in and get a feel for things. the guy who lent it to me said i should probably get my own radio before giving his back and now im going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what to actually buy.

theres so much stuff out there and everyone seems to have strong opinions. ive seen people say the cheap chinese radios are fine for starting out and other people act like theyre basically dangerous garbage. then theres yaesu and kenwood and icom all with their own versions and the prices jump way up fast. im not made of money but i also dont want to buy something twice if i can help it.

mostly gonna be using it for local repeaters and maybe some simplex when im hiking. not sure about aprs yet, might be cool. what would you guys actually recommend for someone just starting out, like what do you wish you had known before buying your first HT

welcome to the hobby, and dont stress too much about this decision honestly. for what you're describing — repeaters and hiking simplex — you have a lot of good options and none of them are gonna let you down badly.

the baofeng situation is one of those endless debates around here. they work, they really do, but the receiver isnt great so you can get interference and weird stuff happening on busy rf environments. for a first radio though a lot of people start with one and its totally fine. if you want to step up a notch without spending icom money, the yaesu ft-65 is worth a look, solid little dual band HT, pretty intuitive menu system, and the audio is noticeably better than the cheap stuff. kenwood makes good HTs too but theyre harder to find locally sometimes.

if aprs is something you think you'll actually use and not just think sounds cool for a month and then forget about, the yaesu ft5dr has aprs built in and its a genuinely nice radio. little spendy for a first HT but some people just go straight to that and dont regret it. depends on your budget really.

the one thing id actually say is whatever you get, spend time learning the menu before you're standing on top of a mountain trying to figure out how to change the squelch. they all have their quirks.

oh man i was in the exact same spot like eight months ago. ended up going with the ft-65 after reading way too many threads like this one and im pretty happy with it. the only thing i wish it had was more memory channels because i keep running out of space when i travel and want to program in local repeaters. but for everyday use around home its been great, battery lasts forever and it survived me dropping it on concrete which i was very unhappy about but the radio was fine.

one thing nobody told me until after i bought mine — get chirp set up on your computer before you try to manually program a bunch of channels. doing it through the menus is technically possible but chirp makes it like a hundred times easier and its free. just need the right cable for whatever radio you get.