okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i finally got my baofeng programmed with the local 2m repeater frequency. i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. talked to a guy at the club meeting and he said i probably dont have the right CTCSS tone set. so i looked it up on the repeaterbook listing and it says 100.0 Hz for the tone. i put that in but im not 100% sure if i set it on TX only or both TX and RX and now im second-guessing myself.

also separate question — is there some kind of protocol for jumping into a conversation that's already going on? like do you just key up between transmissions or wait for a pause or what. i dont want to be rude about it but i also dont want to just sit there listening forever waiting for an opening that never comes. any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

For the CTCSS thing — yeah you want to set it on TX only in most cases. The RX tone (sometimes called tone squelch or TSQL on some radios) would mean your radio only opens up its squelch when it hears that tone coming back from the repeater, which you usually don't need unless the frequency is really noisy and you want to filter out interference. Just TX tone is what 99% of repeaters expect from you. Double-check in the baofeng menu that you've got T-CTCS set and not R-CTCS, those are easy to mix up on those radios.

As for jumping in — totally normal to just say your callsign between transmissions. Like wait for someone to unkey and then just say "KD9XYZ monitoring" or something short like that. Most regulars on a repeater are happy to have someone new check in, honestly. Just don't key up in the middle of someone talking and you'll be fine.

the tone squelch vs just TX tone thing got me too when i was starting out, took me forever to figure out why i could hear everything but my radio would randomly go quiet lol. anyway yeah what the other guy said is right, TX only is what you want.

one thing i'll add on the etiquette side — some repeaters have a courtesy beep that happens after someone unkeys, kind of a short tone. that's actually your signal that it's okay to transmit. if you key up before that beep you might step on the tail of the previous transmission and the repeater might reset or act weird depending on how it's set up. not a huge deal but worth knowing. took me a while to get the rhythm of it