okay so ive been licensed for about three months now and I finally got my HT programmed up with a few local repeaters from repeaterbook. most of them work fine but theres one that i can hear people on just fine but when i transmit nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. checked my offset and its correct for the frequency.

someone at my club mentioned it might be a CTCSS tone thing but honestly the whole tone squelch stuff still confuses me. like i understand the basic idea — you need to send a specific sub-audible tone to open the repeater — but how do I know which tone to use if the repeater's listing on repeaterbook just says 'PL 100.0' or whatever. is that the tone I program into my radio as the transmit tone? and do I also need to set a receive tone or is that separate?

also is there any etiquette thing I should know about before I start trying to kerchunk repeaters to test if im getting in? I dont want to annoy anyone

yeah you got it right, the PL 100.0 on repeaterbook is exactly what you set as your transmit tone (sometimes called CTCSS TX or encode depending on your radio). that's what the repeater's controller is looking for before it opens up. so if you're not sending that tone the repeater just ignores you, which would explain why you can hear others but cant get in.

the receive tone (sometimes called CTCSS RX or decode) is a different thing — that's for YOUR radio to only open its own squelch when it hears that tone coming from the repeater. most people dont bother setting that unless theyre in an area with a lot of interference on the same frequency and dont want to hear random garbage. not required to access the repeater.

as for kerchunking — totally normal to do a quick test transmission, just say your callsign after. something like just keying up and saying your call is fine. dont just key up and say nothing or you'll get some grumpy responses on a busy machine. most repeater owners are cool about it though, they understand people need to test their setup.

oh man this was exactly my confusion when i first started too. I spent like two days thinking my HT was broken before someone explained the tone thing to me lol. one thing i'll add — some repeaters have a courtesy beep or a tail when you let go of PTT, if you hear that after you transmit then you're definitely getting into it. if you hear nothing at all after your transmission, either the tone is wrong or your signal just isn't making it there.

also just a heads up some repeaters around here are linked to other systems so when you first check in you might suddenly be talking to people in like three different states which was a little surprising the first time it happened to me