so ive been licensed about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know isnt the fanciest thing but it works. anyway theres a 2m repeater maybe 8 miles from me that i can hear people on just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a CTCSS tone of 100.0 Hz. ive got that programmed in i think but im not sure if im doing it the right way — like is the tone supposed to be on transmit only, or do i need it on receive too?

also i heard someone on there last week say something like 'please identify before kerchunking' and i wasnt sure what that even meant. i dont want to be rude i just dont totally understand all the etiquette stuff yet. is there like an unwritten rulebook for using repeaters or do i just kind of learn as i go?

totally normal to be confused by this stuff at first, dont worry about it. so the CTCSS tone — on most HTs including the Baofeng you want the tone set on transmit only, not receive. the receive side is for if YOU want to squelch out signals that dont have that tone, which honestly most people dont bother with on a handheld. just make sure your TX tone is set to 100.0 and youre good there.

the kerchunking thing is basically when someone keys up the repeater really quick just to test if theyre hitting it, without ever saying their callsign. the reason people get annoyed by that is technically every transmission you make is supposed to have your callsign. so if you wanna test if youre getting into the repeater just say something like '[your callsign] testing' and that covers you. its really not a big deal people just like to keep things tidy on a busy machine.

also double check your offset is right — 2m repeaters are usually minus 600 kHz. if the offset is wrong youre transmitting on the output frequency and not going into the repeater at all which would explain why nobody hears you.

yeah what he said about the offset, that got me too when i first started. i was so focused on the tone i totally forgot to check which direction the offset was going lol. spent like two days wondering why i could hear everyone but couldnt get a response. embarrassing in hindsight but whatever, we all start somewhere i guess.