so ive been trying to hit the local 2m machine on 146.73 for weeks now and cant get in. i can hear it fine but when i key up nothing happens. i checked my offset and frequency about 10 times, even tried different radios. finally someone at the club meeting last night said i need the pl tone but nobody knew what it was.

the repeater book says 103.5 but when i program that in i still cant get it to key up. tried 107.2 and 100.0 as well since those seem popular around here. am i missing something obvious? ive never had to use tones before on the other repeaters in the area.

maybe the book is wrong or outdated? this is driving me nuts lol. my kenwood th-d74 is set to encode the tone and the frequency/offset are definitely correct.

have you tried listening to see if you can hear the tone the repeater is putting out? some radios can detect ctcss on receive. also double check that youre actually transmitting the tone - on some radios theres separate settings for transmit tone and receive tone squelch.

103.5 is pretty standard around here though so that should be right. might be worth driving closer to the repeater site if you can, sometimes fringe coverage means the repeater can hear you fine but your signal isnt strong enough to open it up properly

yeah this happened to me too when i first got my tech license. turns out i had the menu set to TSQ instead of just T. TSQ means your radio only opens up when it hears that tone from the repeater, but T just transmits the tone which is what you want for repeater access.

check your manual for the difference between tone encode and tone squelch. you probably want just tone encode turned on