ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater scene. theres a repeater listed in the directory about 8 miles from me and it shows a CTCSS tone of 100.0 Hz. so i programmed that into my baofeng as the transmit tone and i can hear people on it fine but when i key up nobody responds and i sometimes dont even hear my own signal come back through the repeater.

i guess my question is - do i need to set a receive tone too or just the transmit tone? and also is there some kind of standard way you're supposed to ID yourself when you first get on a repeater? like do you just say your callsign and say you're listening or what. i dont want to be that guy who does everything wrong and annoys everyone

Hey welcome to the hobby. So for your situation - you generally only need the transmit tone set, not the receive tone. The receive CTCSS (sometimes called decode) is optional and just filters out what you hear on your end, which honestly most people leave off so they can hear everything coming through. The fact that you're hearing others is a good sign your radio is in the right ballpark.

The not hearing yourself come back is worth looking into though. Could be your offset is wrong - most 2m repeaters use a standard -600 kHz offset but not all of them, so double check that against whatever directory you found it in. Also some repeaters have a courtesy beep that comes after you unkey, if you're hearing that then you're definitely hitting it fine and people just might not be around at that time.

As for getting on - yeah just key up, say your callsign, and something like "[callsign] monitoring" or "listening" is totally normal. Some people say "for any traffic" which sounds old fashioned but you hear it. Dont overthink it, most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming to new folks.

also just to add - i was in the same boat when i started and one thing that tripped me up was that some repeaters around here are linked into systems like IRLP or Allstar and they have like weird quirks where theres a delay before the repeater lets you in or theres a special tone sequence you gotta send first. worth checking if the repeater has a website or a club behind it, usually theres info on there about how it all works and if theres any linking stuff going on