so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally got my baofeng programmed (yes i know, i know) and i can hear people on the local 147.xxx repeater just fine but whenever i key up nobody responds and i dont think im actually hitting it. did some reading and it sounds like i need a CTCSS tone but the repeater directory just says the tone without explaining what to do with it.

like do i set it as a transmit tone or receive tone or both? my radio has options for like T-CTCS, R-CTCS and CT and honestly the manual is not helpful at all. i did try just keying up without any tone and i heard the repeater tail so maybe i did hit it but still nobody acknowledged me. maybe i just caught it at a quiet time? anyway any help would be appreciated, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems really knowledgeable.

For a standard repeater you just need the transmit tone set, that's your T-CTCS on the baofeng. The receive tone (R-CTCS) is optional and just filters out traffic you don't want to hear — most people leave that off unless the repeater is really busy and they want some peace and quiet. Set the transmit tone to whatever the directory lists and you should be good.

And yeah hearing the repeater tail just means your signal got through and the repeater heard you, so you were hitting it. Totally possible you just caught a quiet moment. Try calling out something like your callsign and that youre monitoring, give it a few seconds and see what happens. Most repeaters around here are pretty quiet during the day unless something is going on. Welcome to the hobby by the way, the baofeng will get you started just fine until you figure out what you actually want to do with the license.

same thing happened to me when i started out lol. also worth checking if the repeater is linked to anything because some of them are on echolink or IRLP and you might hear people from totally different areas which threw me off at first. i thought i was going crazy hearing someone say theyre in florida when the repeater is like 10 miles away from me.