ok so i just got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get onto the local 2m repeater. i programmed the offset and everything and i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me. a guy at the club meeting mentioned something about a PL tone but i wasnt sure what that was exactly so i just nodded along like i understood lol.

did some googling and i think i need to set a CTCSS tone on my radio? the repeater directory listing shows 100.0 but i honestly dont know where to set that in my baofeng. ive been messing with the menus for like an hour. also is there some kind of etiquette i should follow when breaking into a conversation that's already going? i dont want to be that guy who just talks over people

yep you got it right, that 100.0 is the CTCSS tone you need. on a baofeng its buried in the menu, i think its menu item 13 or somewhere around there depending on which model you have — its labeled T-CTCS or something like that. set that to 100.0 and youll open the repeater right up. the receive tone (R-CTCS) you can usually leave off unless the repeater is in a noisy area and you want to squelch out other stuff, but most people dont bother with that part.

as for breaking in, the polite way is to just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign. dont say break break unless its an emergency, that freaks people out. just your call is totally fine. most folks on a repeater are pretty welcoming to new hams, dont stress about it too much.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i was starting out, stared at that baofeng menu for forever. one thing i'd add is double check the repeater offset too — most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 khz but occasionally you get a weird one. if you can hear them but they cant hear you thats usually the tone though, so youre probably on the right track.

the linked repeaters are a whole other thing once you get into that, some of them are tied into IRLP or Allstar networks and you can end up talking to someone in another state without even realizing it which is kind of wild the first time it happens