ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i've been trying to use the local 146.940 repeater but i keep getting nothing back when i transmit. i can hear other people on it just fine so i know my radio is receiving ok. my HT is a Baofeng UV-5R and i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz. i put that in as the CTCSS tone but still nothing. not even a courtesy beep or anything.

i also dont really understand the difference between encode and decode when it comes to tones — do i need both turned on? i thought you only needed to encode the tone when you transmit so the repeater opens up, but my elmer mentioned something about decode too and now im more confused than when i started. also not sure if theres like a proper way to call on a repeater, do you just key up and talk or is there some kind of protocol you're supposed to follow first. thanks in advance

Hey, welcome to the hobby. So the encode/decode thing trips a lot of new folks up. Encode means your radio is sending the CTCSS tone along with your voice when you transmit — that's what the repeater needs to hear before it'll open up and retransmit you. Decode means your radio will only break squelch when it hears a tone coming back on the receive side. For getting into a repeater you really only need encode turned on. Decode is mostly a personal preference thing, some people turn it on so they dont hear random carriers or other repeaters on the same frequency, but it wont affect whether the repeater hears you.

Now the Baofeng — make sure you've got the offset set correctly too. Most 2m repeaters around 146.940 use a -600 kHz offset, meaning your radio transmits on 146.340. If your offset is wrong or not set at all you could be transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely and the repeater would never hear you. Double check that first honestly because that's the most common thing I see with new folks on the UV-5R.

As for calling, most people just wait for the repeater to go quiet then key up and say something like your callsign and that you're monitoring or looking for a contact. No need to be formal about it, just be yourself.

yeah i had the exact same problem when i first got my uv5r lol, turns out i had the offset wrong the whole time. spent like two days thinking the repeater was broken or something. definitely check what the previous reply said about the offset, that's almost certainly it