okay so ive been licensed for about three months now and finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R i know i know but its what i could afford right now. anyway theres a local 2m repeater listed in the directory and it says it needs a 100.0 Hz tone to access it. i programmed that in and i can hear people talking through it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to respond or acknowledge me. im not sure if my tone is actually going out or if im just doing something wrong in the menu settings. the Baofeng menus are kind of a nightmare honestly.

also i noticed sometimes people just start talking over each other on the repeater and i wasnt sure if thats normal or if theres supposed to be like a pause between transmissions? someone mentioned a courtesy beep but im not totally sure what that means. just trying to figure out the etiquette before i make a fool of myself. any help appreciated

The Baofeng CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks. When you're in the menu look for the T-CTCS option, not R-CTCS — the T is for transmit which is what you need for accessing the repeater. R-CTCS is for squelch on receive and most people dont bother with that unless they want to filter out other traffic. If you've only set one and not the other double check which one it actually is.

As for the courtesy beep — yeah most repeaters have a little tone or beep that plays right after someone releases their PTT. It's basically the repeater saying "okay the channel is clear now you can go ahead." The polite thing is to wait for that beep before you start your next transmission, gives everyone a chance to jump in if they need to and also lets the repeater reset properly. Talking over people is usually just someone not waiting long enough, happens to everyone at first. Just listen for a few days before you key up much and youll get a feel for the rhythm of how that particular repeater works.

yeah i had the exact same problem with mine when i started out, took me like two weeks to figure out the menu was set to the wrong tone option. also worth checking — some repeaters around here are linked to other repeaters through systems like IRLP or Allstar and if someone is in the middle of a linked QSO across multiple sites it can seem like nobody is responding to you when really theyre just busy with a contact somewhere else in the state or whatever. might be worth listening longer before calling just to make sure the repeater is actually clear.