so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, tech class, and ive been trying to get into my local 2 meter repeater. i programmed in the frequency and offset just fine and i can hear people talking on it no problem but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds.

did some reading and found out about CTCSS tones but im not totally sure i understand how they work. like do I need to transmit a tone, receive one, or both? my radio is a baofeng uv-5r (yeah yeah i know) and ive been messing around in the menu but honestly the menus on that thing are a nightmare to navigate.

also related question — is there like an etiquette thing for breaking into a repeater conversation? i dont want to be rude but i also dont know what the norms are. someone mentioned saying your callsign between overs but im not sure when exactly to do that. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you all seem to know your stuff

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this stuff it clicks pretty fast once you get a handle on it.

so CTCSS — the short version is that most repeaters require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater controller knows to actually open up and retransmit you. if you dont have the right tone programmed to transmit, the repeater just ignores you. thats almost certainly whats happening. the receive tone (sometimes called DCS or just CTCSS receive) is optional on your end — it just means your radio will stay quiet until it hears that tone coming back, which is useful if theres interference, but you dont NEED it set to get into the repeater.

for the baofeng specifically, you want to go into the channel settings and look for T-CTCS — thats the transmit tone. set that to whatever tone the repeater uses. you should be able to find the tone listed on the repeater's entry on repeaterbook.com, just search your area. most common ones around here seem to be 100.0 or 136.5 but it really varies.

as for breaking in — if two people are having a QSO just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign. dont say break break unless its an emergency, some old timers get pretty grumpy about that. just your callsign is enough and whoever is using the machine will usually acknowledge you and welcome you in.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got my tech, spent like two evenings convinced my radio was broken before someone at my local club told me about the tone thing. once i got it sorted it was like a whole new world opened up lol.

one thing i'll add is that some repeaters around here are linked to other machines through something called IRLP or EchoLink so sometimes when you key up you might actually be going out to a whole network of repeaters in other states or countries. worth knowing just so you dont accidentally walk over someone mid-sentence on a linked system — the latency can be a bit weird and people get a little annoyed if you dont wait a full second or two after the courtesy tone before transmitting. found that one out the hard way