jbantennaman is being rather harsh on you.
It takes time to find your way around. Having many years under my belt as a ham, I found that I do probably 99 percent of my time listening. Having an interest in technical things, I tend to ignore most of the chatter I hear on both the VHF / UHF repeaters as well as most of the gossip, nets and other trash conversations on the HF band.
The real secret here it to listen and listen some more. Find someone near you that you can befriend and maybe that person can become your radio mentor.
On the HF bands, you can occasionally hear a station outside of the US. Most of the time they get covered in other US stations looking to just make a contact to collect another country contact.
Myself, I would rather find out something about the other operator and how he has constructed his station. You learn more by asking questions about equipment. That is what the ham radio learning is all about. Unfortunately today, the majority of the ham operators are what has been labeled appliance operators. They don't know much about their radio, how to fix a problem it may have or what to do if their antenna doesn't seem to work very well.
Originally the ham license was all about getting inside your radio and getting your fingers on the individual components. Today, we have surface mount components and have lost the ability to do much with them unless you have the special tools to replace those surface mount components.
The other part of being a ham radio operator was building your own antennas. Taking some wire, some insulators, a long piece of coax and put together a dipole antenna for the HF bands. Today, all you hear about is someone buying a pre made antenna and putting it up between a couple of trees.
In your case of now having the ability to get on the VHF or UHF ham bands, it might be of interest for you to make a "J Pole" antenna. There are a number of locations on the Internet that have information on these antennas and how to construct them. But it will take some effort and the use of a common hand torch to solder the copper pipe sections together. But that's what it's all about. experimenting and building.
Hope I have not been to abrasive, but have given you some ideas to move forward.
Yes you can go looking for a mobile and use it in the house. I would go looking for used equipment. There is a pile of it floating around. I like to go after the old Motorola Spectra radios. But they do take some effort and knowledge to get them on the ham frequencies. Plus you will need a slow computer with a serial port to be able to program the radios. It will also take obtaining or building a voltage level converter to match the signal levels between the radio and the computer.
You can make your own programming cables. You just need to have a source of the DB9, DB15 and DB25 connectors. Some need to be male and some need to be female.
A good source of this information is on the
Batwing Laboratories web site. Repeater builders site is another good source of technical information. There is a good chat forum site that you will find a link to on the batlabs site.
Welcome to the ham community. Sorry for the long winded post here, but thought some of the other posters were just brushing the surface.
