Do you have a license? Step one is getting your license. QRZ offers "practice" exams online which are literally the questions from the FCC license exam pool [0]. You can rote memorize these questions and answers if you need to. Technician and General are both fairly easy licenses to get. The FCC dropped the Morse (CW) requirement, but this can be a really fun way to get into certain ham bands which are CW-only. Very niche crowd. I suppose the sibling advice I gave is to find a local repeater and just start talking. If you're on the West Coast, I highly suggest checking out the WINS repeater system. It's an internet-connected set of repeaters, so when you hit your local WINS repeater, you're actually going out to most of the west coast and Hawaii. And a few other places. It's always growing. Always super friendly. Well, most of the time it's super friendly.
There was not. I appreciate your helpful attitude toward people on the fence about getting a license, but the parent to my comment was saying "I'm licensed, now what?" And I said ~"I'm in that exact same situation".
But now that we're chatting and you obviously do know your stuff, any pointers for actually putting it to use?
You must have stopped reading at the first couple of sentences, or did you just not see the whole thing about jumping on a local WINS repeater? That wasn't ninja edited in there.
I love the fact that the Baofeng is cheap and I have one myself thinking I'd finally deflower myself on 220 and 70cm. But the rig sits in my trunk unused. I just don't want to use it. The UI is awful. Once programmed some of its users call it the Plastic Fantastic; I don't. No analog squelch knob is still a non-starter.
Try to borrow someone's Icom or Kenwood or Yaesu, listen to the local action, and jump on . Hamming should be fun and it is with a friendlier rig. Try not to let the plastic fantastic turn you off from hamming.
Loraham.org does seem a cool use to tinker with.