APRS uses packet radio to send position reports or send short messages. DRM is used for digital shortwave broadcast radio. The DRM encoding is used in ham radio for sending digital SSTV pictures with software like QSSTV and Easypal.

The FCC sets what parts of the bands can be used for phone and what's CW or data only. Apart from that everything is basically a gentleman's agreement. Since HF can go a long ways, there's no point making local band plans for it. VHF and up is shorter range and some areas have different needs than others. There are frequency coordinators that handle the band plans and repeater pair assignments. Some states have more than one frequency coordinator for different parts of the state. Some frequency coordinators only handle repeater pairs and don't publish a band plan.

On VHF and up, each state will have their own bandplans. Look up the bandplan for your state and look for simplex frequencies.

The nation wide FM calling frequencies for 6m, 2m, 1.25m & 70cm are 52.525 MHz, 146.52 MHz, 223.5 MHz & 446 MHz.

You will want an HF radio to make use of your general class privileges. The Yaesu FT-710 and Icom IC-7300 are good HF base station radios, but will cost around $1000 not including a power supply, antennas, and coax. If you want something cheaper, you can look at the Xiegu G90. It doesn't have as good of a receiver and it's lower powered, but it's half the price and more portable. None of these will do 2M or 70CM, so you will need another radio if you want to work local repeaters.

The Anytone 878 is one of the best DMR radios you can get for ham radio use. If you don't need DMR or APRS, then you could save some money and get a Yaesu FT-60.

There is also the QMX transceiver from QRP Labs. It can do CW as well as single carrier FSK digital modes.

I would suggest getting a radio that can do SSB. There are a lot of digital modes that won't work with radios like the QDX or QMX.

You can run a dipole between two houses, just be sure to do your RF exposure calculations and don't be surprised if you pick up a lot of RFI. You will need to use insulators between the antenna wire and the supporting rope. There is a lot of voltage on the ends of the dipole. If the dipole is less than 1/4 wavelength off the ground, most of the signal will go up. That's good for NVIS on the lower bands, but bad for DX.

You can put multiple dipoles on the same cable, it's called a fan dipole. The wires have to be spread out and can be a pain to work with, but you can get an antenna that's resonant on multiple bands.

The Yaesu FT-60 is a good choice if you only want analog FM.

SDR++ seems to work the best with my RSP1A, I still have to use a closed source driver that hasn't been updated since Dec 2019. At least the driver works fairly well, but sometimes it locks up and the sdrplay service has to be restarted.

The Android driver, on the other hand, is completely broken. It usually crashes within 5 minutes and it only supports up to 2msps. They haven't updated it since Feb 2019.

It works, but it's closed source and pretty basic. I just wish they would release an open source driver.

You could try some Motorola DTR or DRL radios if you want something license free and not super expensive. Motorola claims they cover 300,000 sq ft indoors. They put out 1W on 915MHz, they use frequency hopping spread spectrum, and they have digital audio.

For higher voltages, you could build a Pierce oscillator from discrete components instead of using a hex inverter.