ok so I just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get onto the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. I can hear other people just fine, their conversations come through loud and clear, but when I key up nobody responds and I dont even hear my own audio come back through the machine.

I looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it says the input is 146.955 and output is 146.355 and there's a CTCSS tone listed as 100.0 Hz. I programmed that into my Baofeng and set it to... I think tone encode? but im not sure if I also need to decode set or just encode. my radio has like four different options for the tone squelch stuff and I honestly have no idea what the difference is between them all.

Also slightly related — is there like a standard way you're supposed to announce yourself when joining a conversation? I dont want to just barge in and be rude about it. one of the guys at my club mentioned something about waiting for a pause but I wasnt sure what that meant exactly in practice.

Hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress — this trips up almost everyone at first with the Baofeng stuff especially.

So the CTCSS thing: you only need encode set, not decode. Encode means your radio sends the tone when you transmit, which is what the repeater's input is listening for before it'll open up. If you set it to decode as well, your radio wont open its own squelch unless it hears that tone coming back at you, and most repeaters dont send a tone back out on the output — so you'd hear nothing even when the machine is working fine. Just tone encode, 100.0 Hz, and you should be good.

For the input/output thing double check you have those right too. On a standard negative offset on 2m your radio transmits on the lower frequency (the input) and listens on the higher (the output). Some radios handle the offset automatically when you're in the 2m band and some dont depending on how you programmed it. Worth double checking the offset direction is set to minus.

As for jumping into a conversation — you just wait for the brief pause between transmissions, then key up and say your callsign. Something like "W1XYZ monitoring" is fine. Most folks on a repeater are pretty welcoming to new hams. If the frequency sounds clear and you just want to call out, a quick "W1XYZ listening" works too.

yeah what he said about encode only is right. I made the same mistake when I started, had mine set to tone squelch which means encode AND decode and I thought my radio was broken for like two weeks lol. just flip it to tone or CTCSS encode only and youre set.

also side note — if you're still not getting into the machine after that, sometimes repeaters have specific courtesy tones or timing things and if you're letting go of the PTT too fast your audio might be getting cut. some repeaters have a short hang time before the squelch tail drops so try holding the key a half second after you stop talking before releasing. probably not your issue here but worth knowing.