David Chen

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to actually buy. ive been reading threads on here for like two hours and im more confused than when i started honestly. there's so many options and everyone seems to have a strong opinion.
my main use case is going to be hitting local repeaters and maybe doing some APRS stuff eventually. i also want something that wont fall apart if i drop it, which knowing me is going to happen. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks but i could go a little higher if it really makes sense.
ive seen a lot of people mention the baofeng UV-5R which is cheap but also ive seen people sort of roll their eyes at it. and then theres the yaesu FT-65 and some kenwood options. i just dont know where to start. any advice from people who have actually used these things day to day would be really appreciated.

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he got me interested. i downloaded the ARRL technician manual but honestly its kind of overwhelming, like i dont know if i should just read it cover to cover or what. also heard something about a question pool, is that the actual test questions? like they just pull from that list? i took the practice tests on one of the websites and got like a 55% which i know is not great but i wasnt really studying yet just wanted to see where i was at. anyway any advice on how people actually studied for this would be helpful, not sure how long it usually takes either

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly just doing HF and some local 2m stuff but i finally decided to try working through one of the LEO birds with a linear transponder. picked up a funcube dongle plus a cheap yagi and figured id give it a shot with SO-50 first but then someone told me SO-50 is FM not linear so i switched focus to AO-73 or maybe FO-29 i cant remember which one my tracking software was showing as having a good pass this weekend.
anyway the doppler correction is what's killing me. i understand the concept, signal comes in higher frequency as the sat approaches and lower as it moves away, fine, i get that. but in practice when im trying to work a linear transponder i need to be adjusting both my uplink AND my downlink simultaneously? and they drift in opposite directions? that just seems incredibly annoying to manage in real time especially when the pass is only like 9 minutes long and you gotta actually make a contact in there somewhere.
using gpredict right now linked to my ft-818 via hamlib and it seems to be doing something but honestly i cant tell if its actually correcting or just showing me pretty numbers. did anyone else go through this learning curve or am i missing something obvious

honest answer? the question pool study method still works for extra, theres no way around it. yeah there's some pretty dense stuff in there about things like reactance and impedance matching and the odd question about vacuum tube biasing for some reason, but you dont need to actually understand all of it to pass the test. that said i found that actually working through the math on stuff like LC circuits made it stick better and i retained more of it after the test which has actually been useful.
the extra class HF privileges are genuinely nice if you operate CW at all, the extra segment on 40 is a lot quieter than the general portion most nights. whether thats worth grinding through the exam depends on what you actually do i guess. it took me maybe 6 weeks of using the HamStudy app before i felt ready and i passed with a couple wrong, nothing crazy.

the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 path (note: WIDE2-2 not WIDE2-1 at the end) is actually the more common recommendation these days especially if you're in an area with fill-in digis. WIDE1-1 is specifically intended to be heard by those low-power fill-in digipeaters that might not respond to WIDE2 calls. if your area doesn't have many of those it's basically just adding hops for no reason and yes that can cause duplicate packets floating around which is why you see inconsistent behavior on aprs.fi.
best way to test honestly is aprs.fi combined with findu.com — look at the raw packets and see which digis are actually picking you up and how many times each packet shows. if you're seeing the same packet relayed 4-5 times from the same digi chain that's a sign your path is too aggressive for the local infrastructure. i went through the same thing when i moved out here, took me a while to realize there was a really solid WIDE2 digi about 12 miles out that was doing all the heavy lifting and my WIDE1-1 was just creating extra garbage on the channel.

yeah the relay board thing is a super common headache with the pi. those cheap boards usually have active-low inputs which trips people up constantly — the relay fires when the pin goes LOW not high, so if your GPIO is floating at boot it can trigger randomly. easiest fix honestly is just pull the input pins high with a 10k resistor to 3.3v and then drive them low to activate. or just buy a relay board thats explicitly designed for 3.3v logic, they exist and they're like $3 more.
on the wsjtx side there's actually a UDP broadcast wsjtx puts out on port 2237 by default that you can listen to with python. it sends status packets including the current mode, so you can absolutely only log when the mode field says WSPR. there's a library called wsjtx-assistant or something similar, cant remember the exact name but googling wsjtx udp python should get you there pretty fast. i did something close to this for FT8 logging a while back and it works well once you wrap your head around the packet format.

yeah the door seal thing is probably it, i did basically the same install in my Tacoma and had to switch to a thinner coax to stop the squishing. 2.1 on 70cm isnt gonna hurt anything though tbh, the radio will just back off power a little. good luck on the net saturday