ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and just got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford. anyway theres a 2m repeater listed in the repeaterbook for my area and it shows a 100.0 Hz tone. i programmed the offset and everything but i cant get into it. like i key up and nobody ever hears me, or at least nobody responds.

so my question is — do i need to program that 100.0 tone as a transmit tone, a receive tone, or both? i honestly dont fully understand what CTCSS even does. i read something about squelch but now im more confused than before. also is it considered rude to just call CQ on a repeater or is there some other way youre supposed to announce yourself? i dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone before i even figure out how to get the thing working lol

good news, youre asking the right questions before just stomping on people so youre already ahead of most newcomers honestly. the CTCSS tone — you want to set that as your transmit tone only to start. basically what it does is tell the repeater "hey this is a legit signal, open up" because without it the repeater's controller just ignores you. the receive tone setting on your radio is a different thing, thats for YOUR radio to only unsquelch when it hears a certain tone from the repeater, which most people leave off or set separately. for just getting into a repeater you just need the TX tone set.

as for etiquette, yeah dont call CQ on a repeater, thats kind of a thing people notice. you just say your callsign and say youre monitoring, or if you want to chat just say something like "W1ABC listening" and see if anyone comes back. some repeaters have a courtesy tone that beeps after someone unkeys, you wait for that before you respond. if you transmit while someone else is still talking (called doubling) it just makes noise for everyone. just listen for a bit before jumping in and youll get the hang of it fast.

also worth checking — is the repeater even active? i spent like two weeks messing with tones on a repeater near me and eventually found out it had been off the air for like a year, still listed on repeaterbook but nobody updated it. try looking up if theres a local club that runs it and see if they have a website or anything. some areas have a linked system too where multiple repeaters are connected together and sometimes the linking does weird things with tones depending on which node youre hitting. but yeah the TX tone thing the other guy mentioned is definitely where to start.