ok so i just got my technician license a few weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me. i programmed the offset and everything but a guy at the club meeting mentioned i might need a tone? i looked it up and it says CTCSS which i guess is also called PL tone depending on who you ask, and now im reading about DCS too and honestly my head is spinning a bit.

my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i found the repeater on repeaterbook but the listing just says 100.0 for the tone. do i put that in as the transmit tone or both transmit and receive? i dont want to be keying up and causing problems if i dont have it set right. also someone mentioned something about waiting a couple seconds after the repeater tail before transmitting — is that a real thing or just superstition

yeah you just need the transmit tone set, not the receive side. the receive CTCSS (sometimes called tone squelch) just filters out what you hear on your end — it wont affect whether the repeater opens up for you. so go into the baofeng menu, find the T-CTCS option (not R-CTCS) and set that to 100.0 and you should be good. a lot of new folks set both and it still works fine but technically only the transmit matters for getting into the repeater.

and yes the pause thing is real, not superstition at all. after the repeater drops its carrier there's usually a courtesy tone and then a short tail, and if you jump on too fast sometimes the repeater or the linking system doesnt have time to reset and your first word or two gets clipped. just wait for the beep and then a beat or two and youll be fine. it also gives anyone else a chance to break in if they need to, which is just good operating practice.

i had the exact same confusion when i started lol. took me forever to figure out the baofeng menu. just so you know the T-CTCS is transmit tone and R-CTCS is receive tone and like the other guy said you really only need transmit for most repeaters. once i got that set i could suddenly get into like 4 repeaters in my area i didnt even know were there.

also some repeaters around here are linked to like a whole network — there's one nearby thats on some kind of IRLP or Echolink node and when you key up youre actually talking to people potentially way far away so its worth knowing if the repeater youre using is linked before you just start chatting casually. nothing bad exactly but its just nice to know. the repeater book listing usually mentions it.