Where am I, who can I reach
The one list from Near you, with a plain answer per row: what a 5 W handheld with its own antenna can expect from here, from the terrain between you and the site when the map has it and from the distance otherwise; a repeater on a hill reaches further than the number suggests, a valley less. Your position is used once and never stored.
Three ways to be heard, in plain words.
Direct (simplex). Your radio to their radio, nothing in between. Free, always available, and limited to what your antenna can see — a mile or two with a handheld indoors, further outside and up high.
Through a repeater. A machine on a hilltop or a tall building hears you on one frequency and repeats you on another, at much more power and height. That is how a 5 W handheld covers a county. You need its output frequency, its offset and usually a tone — all three are on the repeater's line here.
Through a node. A node is an internet link into the radio network. A node with a frequency is a radio on the air, so a handheld in range reaches it; one without is a hub or a hotspot, reached from a phone app only, and the list says which. A repeater with a linked node is both, and that is how a handheld carries a conversation across the country: the list's "Plan a bounce" walks it. Nodes come and go: only the ones on the air right now are worth calling, which is why the list filters to those by default.
Or find nodes by place
A repeater is the machine on a hilltop that hears your radio on one frequency and repeats it on another, which is how a handheld covers a county. A node is an internet link into the radio network. A node with a frequency is a radio on the air, so a handheld in range reaches it; a node without one is a hub or a hotspot, reached from a phone app only. A repeater with a linked node is both: your handheld into it, and out of any node it is linked to, anywhere. Most listed nodes are not connected at any given moment, which is why the switch above starts on. Talking straight to another operator with no machine in between is simplex, or direct.
Everything here is FM voice. Parts of every band are set aside for Morse, weak-signal and satellite work (on 2 m, 144.000 to 144.300 and 145.800 to 146.000; on 70 cm, 432 to 438), so set a frequency from a list like this one or a repeater's record, never a round number picked by hand.
A node sits at the middle of the town its owner typed, near enough to find, never the antenna itself. Repeaters carry real coordinates. Missing one, or a detail is wrong? The repeater directory is where records are added, fixed and claimed.