Thanks. Ok I have one last question, then I'll leave you guys alone, I promise! I have several scanners and I've found it quite easy to just manually scan with my ham radio to find people chatting. When I have a license and I want to join in, how do I find out if the frequency I found is a repeater and if so, how do I find the PL Tone and proper offset for the repeater so that I can join in eventually? I heard that you usually get that from a directory, but if I just manually found the channel and am not near a computer, is there any way to get that?
Example: Today I just found people chatting on 448.062 by simply scanning the frequencies.
According to the band plan, 447-450mhz is where repeater outputs/inputs are, so you were likely listening to either the repeater output or input frequency.
ARRL Band Plan:
Band Plan
As someone else mentioned, all repeaters have a regular station ID, and some will include the offsets and PL tones in use. You will still want to use a repeater guide to find others, and to get the PL/offset information if it can't be determined otherwise.
One thing the band plan doesn't make clear is that just about anything in the lower half of the band (except the satellite range) will be SSB and not FM, so you won't pick much, if anything, up on your handheld there.
If you want to talk on FM simplex, you would want to look around 446.000mhz. While there's no reason you couldn't do so, people usually don't call CQ much on FM - generally it's "This is <callsign> listening" or similar. Tune around 446 and see if you hear anything in your area, although I doubt you will pick up much.
In my area at least, there is a fair amount of FM simplex activity on 146.46, and on the 2m FM calling frequency 146.52, so you might want to check those out as well. If you make contacts on 446.0 or 146.52, it's courteous to move up or down a bit to keep the calling frequency open for others.
