ok so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater. i can hear everyone just fine but when i transmit nobody responds, not even the repeater itself doing its courtesy beep or whatever. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a 100.0 Hz tone but im not sure if thats what i need to transmit or receive or both. my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i programmed it through chirp but honestly i might have messed something up.

also a separate thing - i heard someone on there say something about linking the repeater to another one during some kind of net and the signal suddenly got way better for everyone. is that like echolink or wires-x or something else entirely? i didnt want to key up and ask because i didnt want to interrupt and also wasnt sure about the etiquette around that, like do you just wait for a break and say your callsign or what

hey welcome to the hobby, dont worry about the baofeng thing, we all started there lol. so yeah the 100.0 Hz CTCSS tone is what you need to be transmitting - thats the subaudible tone your radio sends along with your voice that tells the repeater to open up. if the repeater isnt responding at all you probably have the tone set wrong or maybe not set at all. in chirp when you look at the channel make sure the Tone Mode column says TSQL or Tone (depending on how the repeater is set up) and that the Tone frequency is 100.0. TSQL means it'll also squelch your receive unless it gets the tone back, which is fine for most repeaters but not all.

as for the linking thing, yeah a lot of repeaters around here are connected to systems like echolink or sometimes they use stuff like IRLP or allstar to link to other repeaters across the state or even internationally. during a net the trustee sometimes fires up the link so people from further away can join in. totally normal stuff. and yeah for etiquette just wait for a pause, key up briefly and just say your callsign, something like "KD9XYZ monitoring" and see if someone acknowledges you. nobody bites on a linked net, people are usually pretty welcoming.

i had the exact same problem with my uv-5r when i first got started, turned out i had the offset direction wrong on top of the tone issue so i was transmitting on the output frequency instead of the input. repeater was hearing nothing from me. double check your offset too, most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 kHz and which direction depends on the frequency. repeaterbook usually shows all that info if you look at the full listing for the repeater.