ok so ive been licensed about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and im trying to access a couple of the local repeaters listed on repeaterbook. some of them i can hear just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or the repeater doesnt open up. i went through the settings and i think i have the offset right but im not totally sure about the CTCSS stuff.

from what i understand you need to transmit a subaudible tone to access most repeaters, is that right? but on repeaterbook some listings show a tone and some dont. if theres no tone listed does that mean its open carrier or is the info just missing? also one of the local guys told me i need to set the tone on transmit only and not on receive but i wasnt sure why that matters. my radio has options for like tone, ctcss, dcs and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. just trying to figure out the basics before i embarrass myself too much on the air

yeah you've got the right idea basically. CTCSS is a continuous subaudible tone you transmit alongside your voice and the repeater's receiver is set to only open up when it hears that specific tone — keeps it from triggering on noise or other signals it's not supposed to respond to. if repeaterbook doesn't list a tone it could mean open carrier (no tone needed) but honestly the data on there is sometimes out of date so worth checking with a local club or the repeater's trustee if you can find them.

the reason your friend said transmit tone only is that if you put the tone squelch on receive too, your radio will only open its own speaker when it hears that tone coming back from the repeater, which is usually fine but sometimes you'll miss part of a transmission if the courtesy tone or ID doesn't carry the PL tone. most people just set encode only and leave decode off, that way you hear everything coming off the repeater. on a baofeng the setting you want is just the T-CTCS menu option, set your transmit tone there and leave R-CTCS on off. should do it.

i was in the exact same situation a few months ago lol, those baofeng menus are genuinely confusing. one thing that tripped me up was i had the offset direction wrong — i had it set to + when it needed to be - and so i was transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely. worth double checking that too while you're at it. most 2m repeaters around here are minus 600 but it does vary