I would like to get one for checking my antennas. I am also working on a stealth install in my car, so I will definitely need it for tuning the public safety antenna I'm looking at. Power levels should be around 50W, looking at 2m/70cm. Budgeting under $100 for this.

I'm looking at these units right now: MFJ 842, MFJ 862, MFJ 844. All are $60-70ish. I have also looked at a Diamond SX-40C.  It seems like the little portable ones might be a nicer when working on stuff jammed into a car, but what do y'all think? Any experience with these?

For what you describe, an antenna analyzer will be 1000x easier and more efficient than a power/SWR meter.

I have thought about getting one, and since antenna design is one of the areas of electrical engineering I actually enjoy, it could be worth the investment. As a university student I do have access to vector network analyzers and some pretty trick RF stuff, but it's not like I can roll my car into the lab to test things. Plus I think the dean would murder me if I cooked a five figure instrument on a personal experiment.

Seems like basic analyzers run around $200 up for anything that handles 2m/70cm.  I did see a Chinese unit that covers 140M-2.7G for around $160 off Ebay and Aliexpress, from some outfit called "Accuracy Agility Instrument". Upon further review it seems member 'mancow' has one and likes it, from an archived thread in February 2017. Might have to look into it.

Full disclosure: When I got into ham radio, the only power/SWR meter in town belonged to the 2-way radio dealer and he sure as hell wasn't loaning it out. We put our antennas up and had a ball working the world in our blissful ignorance.

What you're trying to do is get the SWR down to minimum value, which any decent SWR meter will allow you to do. For these, the MFJ meters will be adquate.

I do have a RigExpert analyzer, but I play around with multi-band, multi-element wire HF dipoles. This is where an analyzer with a plotting feature is a big time-saver.

I have a vhf/uhf swr meter and when I got into hf bought an mfj-259c antenna analyzer.

The analyzer is so much easier yo tune sntennas with it isnt funny. I like being able to tune individual freqs and sweep freqs manually. It does not plot but is very easy and fast to use. I dont do uhf here due to restrictions, do I did not need that. If you can swing the extra bucks, the antenna analyzer is way more useful, but will not give power output of the rig, which you might want for vhf/uhf

Thanks for the info. I am still deciding, I'm sure I'll end up with both a meter and an analyzer one day. Just need to prioritize, and live within my budget. Sounds like the meter will be enough to make sure I'm not going to cook my radios with a bad or poorly tuned antenna.

One thing that concerns me about the analyzers is calibration, the MFJ and Rigexpert units all seem to be pretty easy to cal from reading their manuals. The AAI manual is in bad Chinglish and I'm still not exactly sure how it is calibrated.

I got one of the vhf/uhf workman ones off ebay. It was around $30 shipped.
I get SWR's as low as the meter reads and at least I feel I've done my part.
It DOES work on UHF, which is a problem with some of the cheaper meters.

We coughed up 12 bucks for a CB SWR meter, and replaced the 1N60's in the bridge section with some of those newfangled "hot carrier" diodes.

Worked great on 2 meters, and meh on 440.