so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and i finally got a baofeng set up to hit the local 2m repeater. i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or respond. did some reading and i think it might be a CTCSS thing? the repeater listing on repeaterbook shows a tone of 100.0 but i honestly dont fully understand what that means or where exactly i program it in. like is it a transmit tone or receive tone or both? i set something in the radio but im not sure i did it right.

also a separate question kind of — when people are already mid-conversation on a repeater is it rude to just jump in? i waited for a gap and said my callsign but nobody acknowledged me and i felt a little weird about it. not sure if thats a me problem or just how it works sometimes. anyway any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about the baofeng programming stuff — it trips up almost everyone at first. the 100.0 tone you see on repeaterbook is what you need to set as your TRANSMIT tone, sometimes called encode. basically your radio needs to send that subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. the receive tone (decode) is optional on most setups, it just filters out noise on your end so you dont hear every blip the repeater picks up. for everyday use just set the transmit tone and leave receive alone until you understand it better.

as for jumping into a conversation — what you did was exactly right honestly. saying your callsign in a pause is the correct thing to do. sometimes people just dont hear you or the repeater dropped your signal a bit. try it again next time, most folks on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams checking in. if the repeater has a net night or a regularly scheduled roundtable those are even better because people are specifically there to chat.

yeah the chirp software might make programming that thing a lot easier if you havent tried it yet, baofengs have like 40 menu items and half of them are labelled in ways that make no sense. i wasted probably two weekends messing with mine before i just used chirp and it took 10 minutes. just make sure you download the right version for your specific model.

oh and dont feel bad about the conversation thing, ive been on some repeaters where the regulars are so deep in their own chat they kind of ignore break-ins for a while. not malicious just kinda oblivious sometimes. other repeaters are super welcoming. just depends on the crowd really.