ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but half the time nobody responds and im not sure if its my tone or just nobody is around. the club website says the repeater uses 100.0 Hz PL tone and i programmed that into my baofeng but sometimes i can hear people talking on it just fine and then i key up and nothing happens or people just dont respond. is there like a wrong way to use CTCSS or am i maybe transmitting the wrong tone outbound? i honestly get confused about whether the tone is for accessing the repeater or something else entirely. also saw something about the repeater being linked to some kind of network, echolink maybe? and i dont know if that changes anything. sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out the local scene

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new hams. so the CTCSS tone (some people call it PL tone, same thing basically) is what you transmit to open the repeater's squelch on the input side — without the right tone the repeater just ignores your signal. if you can hear traffic on it then your receive is fine, the issue is almost definitely your transmit tone setting. on the baofeng you need to make sure the tone is set on the TX side specifically, not just decode/receive. there's a setting in the menus where you can have it encode, decode, or both — you just want encode for most repeaters.

as for nobody responding, that's honestly just how it is sometimes. some repeaters are pretty quiet during the day and then come alive around commute hours. try calling out around 5-6pm local time and you'll probably get a response. just say your callsign and that you're monitoring or looking for a chat, keep it simple.

the echolink thing is separate — some repeaters are connected to the internet and can link to other repeaters or stations worldwide, but that doesn't change how you access it locally, you still need the right tone. some linked systems have their own etiquette about pausing between overs to let linked stations come back but you'll pick that up as you go.

yeah what he said about the baofeng menu is spot on, i spent like two weeks wondering why a repeater wasnt responding to me and it turned out i had the tone set to decode only lol. chirp software actually makes it way easier to program those radios if you haven't tried it yet, you can see all the tone settings in one spreadsheet view and its harder to mess up.