ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and i finally got a baofeng programmed up and ive been trying to get into a couple of the local repeaters listed on repeaterbook. some of them i can hear traffic just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or i get a weird beep and then nothing. i figured out that most of them need a CTCSS tone to access them but here's where i get confused — do i set the tone on transmit only, or on both transmit and receive? i've seen it called PL tone sometimes too and i wasnt sure if thats the same thing.

also there's one repeater that i got into and said my callsign and nobody responded and i wasnt sure if thats normal or if theres some kind of etiquette thing i was missing. like do you just wait? say your call again? i dont want to be that guy who annoys everybody on the repeater but i also dont know what i dont know if that makes sense

PL tone and CTCSS are the same thing, yeah — PL is just the Motorola tradename that kind of stuck around forever. for accessing the repeater you only need to set the tone on transmit, the receive side CTCSS is a different thing where your radio will squelch until it hears a specific tone coming back at you. most people leave receive CTCSS off so they can hear everything coming through the machine.

as for the no-response thing that's pretty normal honestly. a lot of repeaters especially in smaller areas are just kind of quiet and people monitor but dont always respond to a random callsign. what usually works better is saying something like your callsign and then "monitoring" or asking if the frequency is in use before you start a conversation. some clubs also have specific nets on certain days so you might have better luck catching one of those. dont get discouraged, just takes a bit of time to figure out the local scene

yeah i had the exact same problem when i started lol. for me it turned out i had the offset wrong on top of the tone issue — the repeater input and output are on different frequencies and if you dont have that set right you can hear the repeater just fine but you're transmitting on the wrong frequency. most 2m repeaters are 600khz offset and 70cm is usually 5mhz but double check repeaterbook for the specific one you're trying to hit