ok so i passed my technician exam about 3 weeks ago and finally got a baofeng set up and i found a local repeater on repeaterbook. i can hear people talking on it just fine but whenever i try to key up and say my callsign nobody responds, sometimes it doesnt even sound like the repeater picked me up at all. im not sure if im doing something wrong or if people are just ignoring me lol. the repeater is listed as 146.940 with a -600 offset which i think i have right. is there a tone i need to set or something? i feel like im missing something obvious

yeah almost certainly a CTCSS tone issue. most repeaters require you to transmit a specific subaudible tone along with your audio otherwise the repeater controller just ignores you completely, which is exactly what youre describing. the tone wont be in your audio, you wont hear it, but your radio needs to be programmed to send it. check repeaterbook again for that specific machine, theres usually a field that says "tone" or "CTCSS" and itll be something like 100.0 Hz or 127.3 Hz or similar. on the baofeng you need to set that under the menu somewhere, i think its called T-CTCS on those radios. once you dial that in youll hear the repeater tail when you unkey and then you know it worked. also just make sure your offset is set to negative for 146.940, sounds like you know that already but worth double checking. once you get the tone sorted, just call out your callsign and say youre a new ham testing and most regulars on a healthy repeater will come back to you pretty quick.

went through the exact same thing when i started, spent like two days thinking my radio was broken. it was the tone. once i got that sorted the repeater opened right up. also just as a heads up, some repeaters are pretty quiet during the day and more active in the evenings when people are driving home from work, so dont get discouraged if you get the tone right and still dont hear much, just try again around 5 or 6pm local time.