ok so I just got my technician license about three weeks ago and I've been trying to get on some of the local FM repeaters in my area. I have a baofeng uv-5r (yeah I know, everyone has one) and I can hear people talking fine but when I key up nobody seems to hear me, or a couple times someone came back and said something about a tone I wasn't transmitting. I honestly had no idea what they meant at the time and kind of just said sorry and went quiet.

so I looked it up and I think it has something to do with CTCSS? like the repeater needs a specific sub-audible tone before it'll open up? I programmed what I thought was the right one from a repeaterbook listing but I'm still not sure I did it right because the menu on the baofeng is honestly a nightmare. is there a way to test if the tone is actually going out or do I just have to hope for the best and try to make a contact

yeah CTCSS is exactly what that is, good that you figured it out. the baofeng menu is confusing at first but once you do it a few times it clicks. what you want is the T-CTCS option (not R-CTCS) — the T is for transmit tone which is what the repeater needs to hear from you before it opens the squelch. R-CTCS is for your radio to filter what you receive and most of the time you can just leave that off unless there's a lot of interference on the output.

best way to test it honestly is just to kerchunk the repeater — key up for a second without saying anything and if you hear the repeater tail (that little blip or kerchunk sound when it drops) then you're getting in. just dont make a habit of kerchunking constantly, some repeater owners get a bit grumpy about it. if you get in, just say your callsign and mention you're testing, people are usually pretty welcoming to new folks doing that.

I had the same exact problem when I started lol. the repeaterbook listing sometimes has the tone listed under PL tone or just CTCSS and it's the same thing, just different names. make sure you're entering it as a frequency like 100.0 or 127.3 or whatever, not just a number. I accidentally entered mine wrong the first time and wondered why nothing worked for like two days before someone on the repeater walked me through it.