okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but i keep hearing people talk and i can never seem to get anyone to respond when i call out. my radio shows im transmitting but nothing happens on the other end apparently.

someone at the club meeting mentioned i probably need to program a CTCSS tone and i kind of nodded like i understood but honestly i had no idea what they were talking about. i looked it up a little bit and i think i get the basic idea — its like a subaudible tone that tells the repeater to open up? but im not sure if i need to encode it or decode it or both, and the repeater directory online listed the tone as 100.0 Hz but i dont know where to even put that in my Baofeng.

also when i did finally get through once (i think i accidentally had the right settings) someone was in the middle of a conversation and i just started talking over them which was embarrassing. is there like a way to know when its okay to jump in? sorry for all the dumb questions, just trying to figure this out

No dumb questions here, we were all new once. So the CTCSS thing — yeah you only need to encode it on your transmit side, meaning your radio sends that tone out to the repeater so the repeater knows it should open up and re-transmit what you're saying. You dont necessarily need to decode it on your receive side unless you want to squelch out other signals, but most people leave receive tone off so they can hear everything coming through.

For the Baofeng specifically, you'll want to go into the channel settings (assuming you programmed it as a channel and not just VFO mode) and look for the T-CTCS option — that's the transmit tone. Set that to 100.0 and you should be good. The R-CTCS is for receive, just leave that off for now.

As for talking over people — totally normal mistake honestly. What you want to do is listen for a few seconds after the squelch tail drops, which is that little blip or burst of noise you hear when someone lets go of the PTT. Some repeaters have a courtesy tone too, kind of a beep that tells you the channel is clear for the next person to go. Once you hear that, pause a beat and then you can jump in and identify yourself. Most folks on a linked system are pretty understanding with new hams, just say you're new and they'll usually walk you through things.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i started, spent like two weeks wondering why nobody could hear me and it turned out i had the offset wrong on top of the tone issue lol. repeaters are kind of a lot to figure out all at once. anyway sounds like you're on the right track now