ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R that my elmer helped me program. theres a local 2m repeater about 12 miles away that i can hit pretty reliably from my house but about half the time when i key up nobody seems to hear me or i dont hear myself in the repeater output. my elmer said i probably have the CTCSS tone wrong or maybe not set at all?

i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows 100.0 Hz tone but im not sure if i need to set that as the transmit tone or the receive tone or both. the radio has like 5 different squelch settings and the menu is kind of a nightmare. also is there any rule about how long you should wait before calling on a repeater? i dont wanna step on anyone. just trying to figure out the basics here

yeah the CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks, dont feel bad. the 100.0 Hz you see on repeaterbook is what you need to set as your TRANSMIT tone - that's what opens up the repeater's squelch so it actually lets your signal through. without it the repeater literally just ignores you, which is exactly what you're describing.

on the UV-5R that's menu item 13 (T-CTCS) for transmit and menu 11 (R-CTCS) for receive. you definitely want T-CTCS set to 100.0. you can set the receive one too if you want to filter out other noise on your end but its not required to hit the repeater. as for etiquette, most people wait a second or two after the repeater's tail drops before keying up, that little squelch burst you hear at the end of a transmission. gives time for any other stations to jump in. you're on the right track though, just keep trying

also just a heads up some repeaters around here have gone to DCS codes instead of CTCSS so double check that too if you keep having trouble. and honestly the UV-5R menus are genuinely terrible lol i spent like an hour on mine before i figured it out. theres a pretty good walk through on miklor.com specifically for that radio if you havent found it yet