okay so ive been licensed for about three months now (tech class) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford. anyway i've been trying to get into the local 2m repeater that's listed in the repeaterbook app and it says the input tone is 100.0 Hz. so i programmed that in but when i key up nobody responds and i cant even hear myself in the repeater output.

here's the thing though — sometimes i can hear other people having conversations on the output frequency just fine. so the repeater is definitely active. but when i try to transmit it's like im not getting into it at all. my friend who's been a ham for years says maybe im transmitting the wrong tone or the offset is wrong but i honestly dont fully understand how offsets work yet. im in a pretty flat area so maybe it's just a coverage thing? or is there something else im missing with the CTCSS setup? any help would be great

A few things to check — first make sure your offset direction is set correctly. On 2 meters, most repeaters use a negative 600 kHz offset, meaning your radio transmits 600 kHz below the output frequency you're listening on. On the UV-5R this isn't always set automatically when you manually enter a frequency, so double check that in the menu. It can be a little buried.

Second, the CTCSS tone needs to be set as your transmit tone, not your receive tone. Some people accidentally set it on the receive side which would mean your radio only opens its squelch when it hears that tone coming back, but it wouldn't affect whether the repeater hears you. The repeater is looking for that 100.0 Hz subaudible tone on its input, so yours needs to be transmitting it.

And yeah, coverage could genuinely be the issue too especially with a stock rubber duck antenna on an HT in a flat area. Sometimes it just takes driving to higher ground or getting outside away from buildings to know for sure. Try finding someone locally on the air and ask them to listen for you — most folks are happy to help a new ham troubleshoot this kind of thing.

so i had basically the exact same problem when i started out like six months ago lol. for me it turned out my offset was going the wrong direction, i had it set to plus instead of minus and was just transmitting into empty air basically. once i fixed that it worked right away.

also one thing i'd mention — some repeaters around here have a courtesy tone you hear after someone unkeys, kind of a beep or a short tone, and if you're not hearing that even when others are talking it might mean the audio path from the output to your radio is fine but there's like a delay or something quirky going on. probably just the offset thing though honestly