ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my HT programmed for the local 2 meter repeater. my elmer helped me get the frequency and offset set up but the CTCSS tone thing is kind of confusing me still.

so from what i understand, you program a tone so the repeater opens up and actually retransmits your signal, right? but someone at the club meeting said some repeaters also have a tone they send back out and you can set your radio to squelch on that too so you only hear traffic from that specific repeater. is that true? because i didnt realize there were two separate tone settings, i thought it was just one thing you had to enter.

also kind of a separate question but related — whats the deal with etiquette on these things. like do i just key up and start talking or is there some protocol i should know about? i listened for a while and it seems like people just say their callsign and wait but i wasnt totally sure. dont want to be that guy who does it wrong on his first real transmission lol

yeah you've got the basic idea right. the tone you transmit to open up the repeater is called the encode tone (or sometimes just PL tone, which is Motorola's old tradename for it but everyone uses it). the tone the repeater sends back is for decode on your end — so your radio can filter out anything that isnt from that repeater. that second part is more useful when you've got multiple repeaters on nearby frequencies and you dont want to hear bleedover from the next county.

honestly for most people starting out you only need to worry about the encode side. just make sure you've got the right tone entered for transmit and you should open the machine fine. the decode setting is kind of optional depending on your situation.

as for etiquette — you basically had it right just from listening. key up, say your callsign, maybe say "monitoring" or just your call and wait a beat to see if anyone comes back. some repeaters have a courtesy beep after someone unkeys which tells you the repeater is ready for the next person to go. wait for that before you start your reply if you're already in a QSO. and leave a gap between transmissions so someone can break in if they need to.

i was in the same boat not too long ago, the two tone thing threw me off too. what radio are you using? some HTs label the settings differently which makes it even more confusing, like mine just said "rx tone" and "tx tone" and i had no idea which was which for a while.

one thing i'll add on the etiquette stuff — a lot of repeaters around here have a linked system where your transmission goes out on like 4 or 5 repeaters across the region at the same time. worth finding out if yours does that before you key up because it changes things a bit, like you might get a reply from someone 80 miles away and not realize it. nothing wrong with that, just good to know so you're not confused when someone answers and says they're in a totally different town than you expected.