okay so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally got my baofeng set up to hit the local 2m repeater, at least i think i do. sometimes i can hear other people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont hear the courtesy tone or anything. someone at my club mentioned i might have the CTCSS tone wrong but i thought i set it to 100hz like the repeater directory said.

what i dont get is why i can HEAR the repeater but not get into it. like if im on the right frequency shouldnt it just work? do i need to program the tone on both transmit and receive or just transmit? ive been reading about DCS codes too and now im even more confused. any help would be great, trying not to bother people on the repeater itself with dumb questions haha

yeah this trips up a lot of new hams, dont worry about it. so the short version is you only need the CTCSS tone on your transmit side — the tone you're sending TO the repeater. the repeater has a tone squelch so it wont open up unless it hears the right tone from you, thats why you can hear it but it cant hear you (well, it hears you but ignores you basically). your receive side doesnt need a tone set unless you want to filter out other traffic, which honestly on a busy repeater some people do but you dont have to.

double check what tone the repeater actually needs though. 100hz is common but some around here use 88.5 or 127.3 or all kinds of things. the repeater directory is usually right but sometimes its outdated. if your club has a website or a trustee listed you can reach out and just ask. also worth double checking your offset is correct — 2m repeaters are usually plus or minus 600khz depending on where in the band you are. if the offset is wrong you might be transmitting on the input but listening on the wrong output or something weird like that.

oh man i had the exact same issue when i first started, spent like two weeks thinking my radio was broken lol. turned out i had the tone set but also had tone squelch enabled on receive so i was basically filtering out the repeater's output. once i turned off the receive tone squelch it all clicked. baofengs can be a little finicky with how they label that stuff in the menu too so just make sure youre editing the right channel settings.