Good evening gentlemen, brand new but seriously getting into the fly fishing world. Just got a new cheap beginning setup. Didn't come with backing line. Since the backing line appears to be just braided line commensurate with the rod weight, can I use plain braided line for backing? It did come with a generous 15 yards of fly line...which I assume is 20 short of necessary? Advice please.

If you are referring to braided fishing line like the bass fishers use, I do not recommend using it. It is too thin and too slick. Tends to tangle into mess. Academy used to carry a small spool of backing, but I haven't looked recently.

About 45 ft of fly line is shorter than usual, but it will get you started. You'll catch most of your fish in that range anyway.

Ask questions, we'll try to help you get started.

Get a spool of 20# dracon backing off Amazon. You can also get some pretty cheap tapered leaders on Amazon. But don’t pinch your pennies on the fly line. Good quality fly line is the most important part of your setup.

Steelheaders in the northwest also use mono backing, a shooting head and a leader system. This is most prevalent with skagit / scandi styles.
A long or full length fly line is only for line and drift control as in current, but is also the accepted norm and easier to use than to engineer a system.

Thank you for the response. That helps a lot! Could anyone here tell me where I can buy backing and fly line in a 75 mile radius of Palestine Texas?

The problem with braid as backing is it can cut into your hand in that rare but happy event a fish sends you into your backing. Some avoid mono as it can creep through a seam into the reel and foul things up, and unless its amnesia (old school backing for shooting heads, it has a lot of coil memory. The usual choice is either 20 or 30 # Dacron...a polyester. A tip: If you intend to attach your backing to your flyline via a loop-to-loop connect😅ion, make the loop/knot in the backing large enough to push the reel through. This allows you to change fly lines without needing to get the tip of the line to connection loop...you're using the reel end to do this.

Depends on what you are fishing for. How many people ever see the backing on a fish? For a lot of uses, the backing is just a reel filler so about any old leftover spool of line will serve. I had a lot of 40# Gel Spun Polyethylene, (Power Pro, Sufix 832) leftover so I used that. Works great and that material, not Dacron, in one form or another is what most fly fishing people going after running saltwater fish use now, although they might buy a labeled GSP fly line backing material instead of one labeled for the conventional reel market. Anyway, GSP is stronger, stretches less, smaller diameter and holds up better than Dacron, but GSP costs more. But, since I had it already, it was free. For long running fish and large arbor reels, GSP is the way to go since those reels already tend to have limited capacity. But most of that doesn’t apply to the typical freshwater situations.

This burn your hand deal, I just don’t know. I’ve had Jack Creavelle and other fish take me well into the backing in a hurry. Seems to be an overblown, very remote, never happened, unlikely to happen to me hazard, but as they say, YMMV.

That is very helpful!! Thanks!