Curious as to what you mean by 'hand held'.
I have an old 'dirt devil' hand held and it's bulky. It werks for the car, but I couldn't use it on my pit.
I have a small canister vac with a 2 stage filter I use and it works great. The hose is long enough that the canister can sit on the deck, and when disposing time comes, I just take off the hose, unplug it, and take it to the trash and dump it out. Starting out with clean filters, I can get that thing full to the top before it starts complaining.