You don't need an insane antenna setup to start out. A lot of Amateur radio people love optimizing their antennas for efficiency, skywave propagation, frequency

You don't need an insane antenna setup to start out. A lot of Amateur radio people love optimizing their antennas for efficiency, skywave propagation, frequency agility etc. but it's not required for basic operation especially in higher frequencies. All radios, regardless of brand, have essentially the same laws of physics driving their antenna requirements (well, some have fancy in-built antenna tuning capability but we're talking small budgets here). But perhaps I've misunderstood. The crazier antennas are generally down in HF frequencies, below ~30MHz. They're crazier because longer wavelengths put more physical demands on antenna optimization. Making an antenna which efficiently operates a 4MHz chunk of spectrum 144-148MHz means you can build something tuned at 146MHz and only suffer very small performance difference when moving <2% off either side of this range. That's a completely different story to HF freqs, Eg. operating 1.8-5.5MHz is <4MHz of spectrum but that <4MHz chunk represents a 300% increase in frequency moving from lower to upper end, a far cry from the 2% needed before. So, to summarize, you can definitely and easily start out without any DIY gear, just usin turn-key stuff. Make friends with other amateurs working the higher/easier frequencies. Even in HF, you can still go a long just by draping bits of old wire around the place, there's still a bit of an art to this but not so difficult to learn :)