Rather than telling the OP to buy something, lets turn this into a teaching experience.
Oostin... You're new. Welcome. I'm not going to sell you on ham radio. I am going to sell you on antenna/feedline theory, which seems to be why you're here.
Lick your wounds, get up and learn about this stuff. I'm sure most of us (myself included) have seemingly dumb looking first posts on this forum. Not many people nowadays are remotely interested in why "it" works. If you want, we can recommend books or online pages that are very well written for beginners. A quick source of information would be visiting your local library and looking up the ARRL Handbook (doesn't matter what year, but 2000-current is better). Printed text always seems to explain objects more accurately instead of "refer to
http://www.......... for more information". Anyways, this book will have a fountain of information you can thumb through and begin to catch on concepts.
BTW, radios have the equivilant of a "snap cap" for guns. They're called a dummy load and have a SO-239 input you can directly connect your radio's coaxial cable to it. It's typically a 50 ohm resistor rated at a given wattage. Larger wattage resistors are soaked in oil to keep them cool. Modern days, these have their place on a technician's work bench to test transmitters, among many other useful tests. Years ago when tube radios ruled the earth, radio operators would tune up into a dummy load to (again, same major principle of modern technicians) tune their transmitters to optimum output against a perfect 50 ohm load.