ok so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. did some reading and apparently i need to program a CTCSS tone into my radio but im not totally sure i understand what that even does or how to figure out which tone to use for a specific repeater.

i have a baofeng uv-5r (i know i know, everyone has opinions about those) and ive been poking around in the menus but theres like two different tone settings, one says T-CTCSS and one says R-CTCSS and i dont know which one i actually need or if i need both. the repeater is listed on repeaterbook and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz but thats about all i know. any help would be great, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems really knowledgeable

welcome to the hobby, dont let the baofeng stuff bother you, plenty of people started on one and they work fine for local stuff. ok so the CTCSS tone thing — the short version is that most repeaters require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up and let you through, otherwise it just ignores you. thats why nobody hears you, the repeater is literally not responding to your signal without that tone.

on your radio the T-CTCSS is the transmit tone, thats the one you need to set to 100.0 Hz to match what the repeater expects. the R-CTCSS is for your receiver side, like if you wanted your radio to only unmute when it hears that tone coming back at you — useful if there's a lot of traffic on the frequency and you only want to hear the repeater. for now honestly just set the T-CTCSS to 100.0 and leave the R side alone or turn it off. that should get you keying up the repeater. give it a try and come back if it still doesnt work, theres a few other things to check like the offset direction.

yeah what the other guy said, also just double check you have the offset right too. 2m repeaters usually use a 600 kHz offset and you need to make sure your radio is set to shift up or down the right direction depending on the repeater's output frequency. repeaterbook should have that info. i forgot to set my offset correctly my first week and was confused why the repeater wasnt responding even after i got the tone sorted lol