ok so ive been licensed about 3 months now (general) and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater. i programmed my baofeng with the offset and everything and i can hear people on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or respond. looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it lists a PL tone of 100.0 hz so i put that in but im not 100% sure if i put it in the right place in chirp. like is the tone supposed to be on transmit, receive, or both? i feel like ive been reading about this for an hour and im more confused than when i started.

also kind of a separate question — when i do finally get on there, is there like a standard way to join a conversation thats already going? i dont want to step on anyone or be rude about it. my elmer mentioned waiting for a pause but i wasnt sure if thats actually what people do or if theres more to it.

totally normal confusion, chirp labels it as Tone for transmit-only which is what you want for most repeaters. you only need to encode the tone on your TX side so the repeater opens up. the receive tone (TSQL in chirp) would be for filtering out noise on your end and most people dont bother with that unless the band is busy or there are multiple repeaters close in frequency. so just make sure the Tone column in chirp has 100.0 and the Tone Mode column says Tone and youre good. double check you saved and wrote to the radio after changing it, that gets people all the time.

as for jumping into a QSO, yeah just wait for a gap between overs and then key up and say your callsign. something like just your call sign is fine, most folks on a repeater will recognize you're trying to check in. if its a roundtable going back and forth they'll usually work you in on the next pass. dont worry too much about messing up, everyone on a local repeater remembers being new.

yeah what he said about chirp is right. i made that exact mistake when i first got my baofeng, had the tone set to TSQL instead of Tone and couldnt figure out why the repeater wasnt responding to me for like two weeks lol. also worth mentioning — some repeaters have a courtesy tone, which is that little beep you hear after someone unkeys. thats basically your signal that its okay to transmit. if you try to talk right over it or before it plays you might get a bit of a tail on your audio or worse you step on someone. just a small thing but people notice it after a while.