ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, technician class, and i finally got a baofeng uv-5r and programmed in a local repeater i found on repeaterbook. the thing is when i key up and say my callsign nobody ever comes back to me and i dont even know if im hitting the repeater at all. i can hear other people on it just fine though which is weird to me.

a guy at my local club mentioned something about CTCSS tones but honestly i zoned out a bit and didnt fully catch what he said. do i need to set something on the radio for that? and also is there like a proper way to call out on a repeater or do you just talk? i feel kinda dumb asking this but better to ask than keep doing it wrong i guess

oh man i remember being exactly where you are, dont feel bad at all. so yes the CTCSS thing is almost certainly your issue. most repeaters these days require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice before they'll open up the squelch and actually let you through. you can hear the repeater fine because you're just receiving, but to get the repeater to hear YOU and retransmit your signal, you need to be sending that tone.

go back to repeaterbook and look up that specific repeater again, there should be a field that says something like PL tone or CTCSS and it'll be a number like 100.0 or 127.3 or whatever. then in your baofeng you need to program that into the TX CTCSS field for that channel. once you do that try keying up and you should hear the repeater's tail — that little blip or kerchunk sound after you let go of the PTT. that means you're in. then just say something like your callsign and the word monitoring and see if anyone comes back. welcome to the hobby btw, it gets way more fun from here

yeah what he said about the tone is right. also just to add — once you do get on and youre not sure if anybodys around, a lot of people will just say their callsign and say "listening" or "monitoring" and leave it at that. dont feel like you have to do some big formal thing. some repeaters also have a weekly net night where theres always people on, worth looking up if your local one does that, good way to actually have a qso when youre starting out