so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R i know i know everyone has opinions on those but its what i could afford right now. anyway i programmed the local 2m repeater that the club advertises on their website, 147.315 with a plus offset. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds.

i looked it up and apparently repeaters use something called CTCSS tones to open the squelch? or maybe its to identify who's transmitting? im honestly not 100% clear on what its actually doing. the club website lists a tone of 100.0 Hz but i wasnt sure if i need to set that as a transmit tone or a receive tone or both. right now i have it set as transmit only i think. is that right? also is there like a proper way to call on a repeater, like do i just say my callsign and say listening or something? i dont want to be that guy who does everything wrong on his first few transmissions

you've got the right idea with transmit tone only, that's exactly how it works for most repeaters. the CTCSS tone (some people call it PL tone, same thing different name) gets sent along with your audio when you key up, and the repeater's receiver is set to only open up when it hears that specific tone. so without it programmed on transmit, the repeater just ignores you completely even though you can hear the output fine. receive tone on your radio is a different thing — thats for your radio to mute itself unless it hears the tone, kind of like a secondary squelch. most people leave that off unless they want to filter out noise.

as for calling on repeater, yeah just kerchunk the repeater first (key up briefly to make sure you're getting in) and if you hear your call sign come back or the courtesy tone beep then you're in. then just say your callsign and say something like "any stations?" or "W1XYZ monitoring" and see what happens. if the repeater has a courtesy beep between transmissions, wait for that before you start talking again. you'll pick it up fast, honestly most people on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i first started, sat there for like two weeks wondering why nobody ever heard me on the local machine. turned out i had the tone set but on the wrong memory channel because i had programmed it twice by accident. double check that the tone is actually saved to the right channel in your radio, the Baofeng menus can be a little funky about that.