okay so ive been licensed for about three months now (tech class) and i finally got my baofeng programmed with help from a guy at the club meeting. the local 146.940 repeater is listed with a 100.0 hz tone but half the time when i key up i can hear myself going into the repeater but nobody ever responds, and sometimes i dont even hear the courtesy beep thing at all.

i guess my question is do i need the tone set for both transmit AND receive or just transmit? i set the CTCSS on my radio but im not totally sure if its just for TX. also is there like an unwritten rule about how long you should wait before calling out again if nobody answers? i dont want to be that guy who just keeps kerchunking the machine every 5 minutes. also someone at the club said something about the repeater being linked to some kind of network on certain nights and i have no idea what that even means

hey welcome to the hobby, good questions and dont worry youre definitely not the only new ham who's been confused by this stuff.

so the CTCSS tone -- you only need it on transmit in most cases. the tone tells the repeater to open up its squelch and let your signal through. on the receive side your radio can use a tone to filter out transmissions that dont have the matching tone but on most repeaters thats not how its set up, the machine just opens for anyone hitting it with the right tone. so yeah just TX tone and youre good.

as for the courtesy beep, if youre not hearing it at all it might mean your signal isnt quite making it into the machine cleanly, could be you're a bit low power or there's some terrain in the way. try bumping up to high power if you havent already and see if that changes anything. the baofeng high power setting isnt amazing but it can help at the edges of coverage.

and the linked network thing -- thats probably something like EchoLink or maybe IRLP or even Allstar. some clubs connect their repeater to other repeaters or internet gateways on scheduled nights, usually you'd hear an announcement tone or something different when it connects. worth asking at your next club meeting which system they use, pretty cool once you figure it out because you can talk to guys hundreds of miles away through your HT.

yeah what he said about the tone, just TX. i made the same mistake when i started and had the tone set on receive too which was actually causing me to miss some transmissions because my radio was filtering everything out lol.

on the etiquette side of things -- the general rule i follow is if i call and nobody comes back, i just wait a few minutes and try again or honestly just monitor for a while first. if the repeater sounds dead quiet for like 20-30 minutes before you call theres probably not many people listening so dont take it personally. weekday evenings and weekend mornings tend to be busier on most club machines at least around here. also some repeaters have a timeout timer so if you talk for too long without unkeying the repeater cuts you off, worth knowing if you ever have a longer conversation going