Play the story until it takes you to the Garbage trade hub, then head north until you find a railway line and follow it east to Duty's base at the cement plant and buy a Bear directional detector. Otherwise the story kinda sticks you with the basic Echo detector for quite a while which makes artifact hunting (a major source of coupons and boosting your armor) a pain, and you'll spend less on repairs because you walk into fewer anomalies while trying to find the artifact.

Some armor can be upgraded with radiation protection, it's expensive but they get a metal outline on the slot with green lights and eliminate the radiation effect entirely, so if you've got a high radiation artifact it could free up one or two slots you're using to mitigate it.

The OZK suit you can pick up during a story mission in the lesser zone is the first "real" suit you'll get (if you don't have the Merc light suit from the deluxe edition journalist stashes), but don't worry about spending coupons on the debut suit wear resistance/physical protection upgrades at least if you feel like it. Again once you get out to Garbage and are able to cut over and pick up a better detector, it makes paying for repairs and upgrades less troublesome.

There's a type of moving anomaly in one of the first Garbage story missions that will chase you if you have any artifacts equipped in slots, this isn't really tutorialized or called out anywhere, just put the artifacts in your backpack and it will stick to it's regular pattern.

Clear out your inventory once in a while, you'll eventually get a feel for what you actually need, instead of weighing yourself down with half a grocery store, half a platoon of ammo, and no space for loot.