ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got a baofeng set up properly i think. theres a repeater listed on repeaterbook about 12 miles from me, shows a 100hz PL tone. i programmed it in, keyed up and said my callsign and... nothing. no one responded, no courtesy beep, nothing. so i waited a few days tried again same deal.

then yesterday i was just scanning and i caught people talking on it so it IS active. i tried to break in during a pause and said my call and still nobody acknowledged me. not sure if im doing something wrong with the tone or if theres like some etiquette thing i dont know about. i dont want to be rude but i also dont want to just keep kerchunking the thing trying to figure out if im even hitting it. any advice would be appreciated

first thing id check is whether youre actually making it into the repeater at all — a lot of repeaters will send a courtesy beep or a tail when someone keys up even if nobody is listening. if youre not hearing that when you unkey then your signal probably isnt getting in, could be the offset is wrong or the tone isnt programmed right. baofengs can be a little weird about how they store CTCSS, worth double checking that its set to transmit tone and not just squelch by tone (which would mean you hear the repeater but it wont respond to you).

as for breaking in, what you did sounds totally fine honestly. during a pause between overs is exactly right. sometimes people just dont hear or are mid-thought. try saying something like your callsign and "monitoring" or even just ask if the frequency is in use before a QSO starts. most repeater groups are pretty welcoming especially to new folks.

yeah i went through basically the same thing when i first got started lol. turned out i had the offset backwards on mine, was transmitting on the output instead of the input so i could hear everyone fine but they couldnt hear me at all. drove me nuts for like a week. also some repeaters around here have a linked system going so sometimes theres a slight delay before the courtesy tone comes through and i used to unkey too fast and miss it entirely