ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R that my buddy gave me. i can hear people talking on what i think is the local 146.940 repeater just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont hear my own audio come back through. did some reading and apparently i need to set something called a CTCSS tone? but i have no idea what tone to use or where to even find that info for my area. also not sure if theres something called an offset i need to worry about too.

honestly the manual for this radio is pretty terrible so any help would be great. been feeling kinda dumb about this for a few weeks now lol

yeah CTCSS is definitely what you're missing. basically the repeater has a small subaudible tone that has to be present on your signal or the repeater just ignores you completely — which is exactly what you're describing. the tone is set by whoever runs the repeater and they dont all use the same one.

best place to find it is either the repeaterbook website or the RepeaterDirectory app on your phone, just punch in your zip code and look up 146.940, itll show you the tone and the offset. for a negative offset repeater like that one youre probably looking at -600 khz offset which is standard for 2m. the CTCSS could be anything, 100hz, 127.3, 88.5 — just depends on the trustee.

once you have the tone set in the Baofeng under the T-CTCS menu option and you have the offset right, key up and wait a second or two after the repeater tail drops before you transmit again. that's kind of a thing with repeater etiquette, jumping on while the tail is still going is considered pretty rude by some folks. good luck, you'll get it figured out.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i first started, felt like i was shouting into a void haha. repeaterbook dot com saved me, seriously just bookmark it now. also some repeaters around here are linked into bigger systems like IRLP or AllStar so sometimes you key up and suddenly you're talking to someone in another state which is pretty wild when it first happens and you don't expect it.