ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my baofeng programmed with the local 2m repeater in my area. the repeater listing on repeaterbook shows a 100.0 Hz tone and i put that in as the transmit tone. but sometimes when i key up i hear a weird squelch tail and other times nothing happens at all. like my signal goes out but i dont get any response and nobody acknowledges me or anything.

i asked a guy at my club and he said maybe i have the tone on the wrong side — like im encoding when i should be decoding or something? i honestly got a little lost. also not sure about the etiquette here, like do i just say my callsign and wait? or do i say something specific. i dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone on the repeater lol. any help appreciated

the tone thing can be confusing at first, dont sweat it. basically what you want is just the TRANSMIT tone set to 100.0 Hz, you usually dont need to set a receive tone (sometimes called DCS or CTCSS squelch) unless the repeater specifically requires it, which most dont. if your radio is opening its own squelch based on a tone coming back from the repeater thats probably causing the weirdness you're hearing. just leave the receive side on carrier squelch or whatever your radio calls it and only encode on transmit.

as for etiquette, yeah just key up, say your callsign and something like "listening" or just that youre monitoring. some repeaters have a courtesy beep after someone finishes talking — wait for that before you reply so you dont step on anyone. honestly the best thing is just to listen for a few days before you transmit much, you'll get a feel for how that particular repeater crowd operates. every repeater has its own vibe a little bit.

oh man i went through the exact same thing with my first baofeng, those menus are a nightmare. i accidentally had tone squelch set on receive and couldnt figure out why i could hear the repeater fine on a scanner but nothing came through on the radio. took me like two weeks to find it buried in the menu somewhere.

also one thing nobody told me early on — some repeaters are linked to other repeaters or to an Echolink or AllStar node and if theres a lot of traffic going on across the link sometimes there's a delay before the courtesy tone. so dont jump in too fast or youll end up talking over someone whos actually three states away lol. found that out the embarrassing way