You don't need full legal power to start working weak signal stations. Most weak signal stations consist of readily available equipment. The average station on 144 MHz is a multimode transceiver, 150 watt amplifier/pre-amp and a 7 to 11 element yagi. Some stations work their way up to a kilowatt of power, several stacked high-gain antennas, and mast mounted pre-amps.

Some multimode VHF/UHF transceivers are still available new, but the used market is the affordable choice for equipment. Used multimode radios can run $250 on up. Used amplifiers usually run a little more than a buck a watt. The higher you go in frequency, the more uncommon the equipment is. Two-meter and six meter equipment is fairly common at hamfests and swap meets. Seventy-centimeter radios aren't too common. Anything higher gets more and more difficult to find. You usually end up buying new, or building the equipment yourself at the higher frequencies.

How far your contacts reach depends on your location and equipment. Some parts of the U.S. have better conditions than others. Here in the Arizona, it's usually brute force all the way. We get very few atmospheric enhancements in the desert. Contacts ranging a few hundred miles away are common, any further and it's a real treat. When "E" layer skip on 50 MHz opens up, it's usually to Texas. Then, depending on the duration of the "E" opening, it tends to swing counter-clockwise towards the rest of the country. The rare two meter "E" opening is really exciting. In 1996 I got in on a two meter "E" layer opening into the Pacific Northwest, WHAT A BLAST!