Also, when you say world wide radio is it possible with just the handheld units to reach Florida from California?
Generally, when people think of amateur radio and worldwide communications, they are thinking of what the public calls "shortwave" and hams call "HF". These are frequencies between 1.6 MHz and 30 MHz where worldwide communications is possible between two stations with no intervening infrastructure. When I make an HF contact from my station in central Indiana to another station in, let's say, Denmark, it's my radio and antenna communicating with the Danish station's radio and antenna with nothing in between us except the ionosphere.
But, not every ham wants to build a station that can do that. The radios range in size from a cigarette pack to a breadbox. The antennas are large affairs are hard, but not impossible, to hide from the neighbors.
The alternative are repeater linking systems that use the Internet to connect local repeaters together. This repeater linking can be implemented using analog radios (Echolink, IRPL, All-Star Link, etc.) or digital voice radios (D-Star, System Fusion, DMR). Using one of these repeater linking systems, your handheld radio communicates with a local repeater, that repeater connects to the linking system, and your signal can go to other repeaters depending on how the linking system works.
There are ways to use the digital handheld radios to talk all over the world either thru a local repeater or hot spot node , but it requires an investment of time to get your license and then purchasing the right equipment, the radio will be around $600 and the Hotspot are another $300 if you don't have a repeater to go through in your area.
You don't need a digital handheld to talk all over the world. Long before hams had digital voice handhelds, we had repeater linking systems that worked just fine with analog radios. Digital voice radios are also not that expensive. DMR radios can be had for less than $200, System Fusion radios are available for around $310, D-Star radios are available for around $340. And, you don't need a hotspot if you can reach a repeater that is already linked.