so ive been licensed for about three months now (technician) and i got a baofeng uv-5r to start out, yeah yeah i know, but anyway im trying to get into the local 2m repeaters in my area and im having a really hard time figuring out the tone stuff. like i can hear people on the repeater just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or the repeater doesnt open up.

i looked up the repeater directory and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz for the input but im not totally sure if im setting the transmit tone or the receive tone or both or what. the baofeng menu is kind of a nightmare honestly. also someone at my local club mentioned something about a courtesy tone and waiting for it before you transmit and i wasnt sure what that was about either. just feeling a little lost with all this and dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude when i finally do get it working.

totally been there, the baofeng menu stuff is confusing at first but you'll get it. so the CTCSS tone you want to set is the transmit tone, sometimes labeled T-CTCS or just TXtone depending on the firmware. the receive tone (R-CTCS) you can usually just leave off or set to the same thing, it doesnt really matter much for getting into the repeater, that's just for your radio to only open its squelch when it hears that tone coming back from the repeater which honestly isnt that useful for most people.

as for the courtesy tone thing, when you're done talking on a linked or most standard repeaters youll hear a little beep or series of beeps after you unkey — that's the repeater telling everyone the channel is clear and it's okay for someone else to key up. just wait for that before you start talking. jumping in before it comes up is one of those things that can annoy the regulars even if you dont mean anything by it. keep your transmissions reasonably short too especially if you dont know how busy the repeater is. good luck, once you get that tone sorted you'll be on the air in no time.

just to add one thing — if youre still not getting into the repeater after setting the tone, double check you have the offset right. most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 kHz and if your radio is set to simplex or the wrong offset direction youll transmit on the wrong frequency and the repeater just wont hear you at all. i spent like two days debugging a tone issue once and it turned out i just had the offset backwards lol. easy fix but easy to miss.