For years all I had was a spud, a skimmer, a couple Schooleys, a few tip-ups and a couple buckets. I fell down the rod and reel rabbit hole for a while until I realized I wasn't catching as many fish as I used too with a plain old spring bobber Schooley, which is fairly cheap, and was the standard for decades. I mostly jig for pan fish with a worm/grub/leech on a small jig, and use a minnow on a hook for northern pike on the tip-ups.

My rods are about 18"-21". You don't really need a long rod since you're just dropping the line into a hole that you're sitting right next to. Especially if your inside a shanty.
For me a spring bobber and inline reel are important. Newer rods are getting super flimsy which lets you do away with the spring bobber, but those rods are so expensive and delicate. A lot of times I think the spring bobber still works better anyway, because it gives me a better jigging motion and allows me to see slack in the line as well as tension. The rod doesn't matter as much with a spring bobber either. So, any cheap one will usually do.
The spinner reels like to ice up, and twist the line which makes the jig spin. They work with a spoon in deep water, but the shallow water panfish will just sit there looking at a spinning jig like they are thinking wtf? Those cheap plastic Schooley reels never ice up, and hardly put much twist in the line. They're just slower at dropping the line. Which reminds me you'll want a depth finder, not the electronic kind, but a big sinker on a little spring clamp. You clamp it to the line so it drops straight to the bottom. So, you can set the depth you want to fish at with the pin on the reel. Then take off the depth finder bate the hook and the line will drop to the same depth you set every time.
With my flipover blocking out the sun in shallow water with a short rod I can sit on top of the hole and look right down at the fish. I think that is what people are trying to accomplish with a lot of the new electronic gizmos they are using, but that stuff just removes your focus from the line.

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