ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (General) and i finally got a decent HT, a Yaesu FT-65 which i really like so far. anyway theres a 2m repeater listed in the RepeaterBook for my area and it shows a 100.0 Hz PL tone. i programmed that in and i can hear other people on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and im not sure if im even hitting the repeater or just talking into the void.

my question is — is the 100.0 tone the one i need to transmit, or is that the tone the repeater sends back to me? ive read a couple different things and now im more confused than when i started. also is there like a standard thing you say when you first get on a repeater? i dont want to be that guy who does it wrong

so the PL tone (or CTCSS, same thing different names) listed in RepeaterBook is what you need to transmit to open up the repeater. the repeater itself may or may not send a tone back to you depending on how its set up, but that's separate. program that 100.0 as your transmit tone and you should be good.

as for what to say — honestly just say your callsign and that youre monitoring, something like "[your call] listening" works fine. some repeaters have a courtesy tone that beeps after someone transmits, wait for that before you jump in or youll step on people. if the repeater has a timeout timer and you key up for too long it'll cut you off too, so keep transmissions reasonable.

one thing worth double checking — make sure your offset is right. 2m repeaters usually want a -600 kHz offset. if you have the offset wrong you might hear the output but your radio isnt transmitting on the right input frequency. that trips up a lot of new folks

yeah what he said about the offset, that got me too when i first started. i spent like two days thinking my radio was broken lol. also some repeaters around here are linked into systems like EchoLink or IRLP so you might hear people from totally different states or countries which is pretty wild when youre not expecting it. if you key up and hear a bunch of beeps or a robotic voice announcing a node number thats probably whats going on. worth looking up if your local machine is part of one of those networks, sometimes theres etiquette specific to linked systems like pausing a bit longer between overs so the link can catch up