okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater scene. there's a repeater listed in the repeater directory that says it needs a 100.0 Hz tone to access it. i programmed that into my baofeng and i can hear people on the repeater just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least they dont respond.

im not sure if the issue is the tone, my radio, my antenna, or just that nobody happened to be listening. i also wasnt sure if you're supposed to announce yourself somehow before just jumping in? like is there a proper way to do this or do people just start talking? a guy at the club meeting mentioned something about listening before transmitting but didnt really explain what he meant by that. im only about 4 miles from the repeater site so range shouldnt be an issue i think.

also there are like 4 or 5 repeaters listed for my area and some say they're linked together — does that mean if i key up on one i can hear stuff from another frequency? sorry for all the questions im just trying to figure this out without making myself look dumb on the air

welcome to the hobby, dont worry you'll get the hang of it pretty quick. the CTCSS thing is almost certainly fine if you can hear the repeater — that part is just receive side and doesn't need a tone at all. the tone only matters when you transmit to open the repeater's squelch. one thing to double check on the baofeng is that the tone is set to transmit only and not encode/decode both ways, because if you have it set to filter incoming signals by tone too then you might be missing some traffic. menu 11 and 13 if i remember right on most of those radios.

as for nobody responding — honestly a lot of repeaters are pretty quiet during the day and you might just be kerchunking into dead air. what you can do is key up and just say something like your callsign and that youre monitoring, like "[callsign] monitoring" and see if anyone comes back. just keying up without saying anything is considered a bit rude on most repeaters because the other users dont know if someone is trying to reach out or just accidentally sitting on the PTT. listening first is good advice but on a quiet repeater sometimes you just gotta say hi and see who's around.

the linked repeater thing is actually pretty cool once you get used to it. yeah basically some repeaters are tied together through internet linking or RF linking so a conversation on one gets rebroadcast on the others at the same time. some systems use Allstar or EchoLink for that. it can be a little weird at first because theres sometimes a slight delay and you have to make sure youre not stepping on someone who's already mid-sentence coming in from a linked node somewhere else. i made that mistake a few times when i was new and felt pretty bad about it lol. just pause a second after the repeater's courtesy tone before you start talking and you'll be fine.