ok so i just got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but i keep hearing people talk and nobody hears me back. i can hear the repeater tail when it kerchunks so i know im hitting it, or at least i think i am.

somebody at the club meeting mentioned CTCSS and i kind of nodded along like i understood but honestly i have no idea what tone to use or even how to program it into my baofeng. the repeater listing on repeaterbook just says 100.0 but i dont know if thats the input tone or output tone or both or what. also is there like a rule about not just kerchunking a repeater over and over to test? someone made a comment and i wasnt sure if i did something wrong

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about the tone thing it confuses everybody at first. the 100.0 you see on repeaterbook is almost certainly the tone you need to transmit to access the repeater — so in your radio that goes in as the encode tone, sometimes called CTCSS TX tone depending on the radio. you dont usually need to worry about the decode side unless you want to squelch out noise when the repeater isnt active.

on the kerchunking thing, yeah its generally considered a bit rude to just key up and drop carrier over and over without identifying yourself, especially on a busy repeater. if youre testing just say your callsign and something like "testing" and most people are totally fine with that. nobody's gonna yell at you for it but it is one of those unwritten etiquette things that old timers notice. once you get the tone sorted you should be good to go, what radio are you using exactly?

so anyway i went through the exact same thing when i first got on repeaters, the baofeng menu for tones is kind of buried. if its a UV-5R you gotta go into the menu and set T-CTCS for the transmit tone, that 100.0 hz is what you want. theres a separate R-CTCS for receive but leave that alone for now unless the squelch noise is driving you crazy.

also worth mentioning — some repeaters around here are linked into bigger systems like IRLP or AllStar and the etiquette on those can be a little different, like you want to leave longer pauses between transmissions so linked stations can break in. just something to keep in mind as you explore more machines.