new to ham radio, so probably doing something dumb. the radio WAS working; the club i bought it from used it, talking on a repeater. later that night i listened to a net discussion, no issues (using the same settings from earlier). i unintentionally hit reset all (don’t ask) and it’s not been able to receive from a repeater since. strangely enuf, it DOES receive the weather station, FM radio, and the periodic automated announcement from the repeater. it’s NOT a squelch issue, pressing monitor only yields static. i downloaded chirp, pulled in all the local repeaters (2m and 70 cm bands), synced to the radio, but that did not fix it…all repeaters are just static. (note the issue happened before chirp). have googled and not found this exact issue. played w/ all obvious settings (like receive and transmit tones, offset, +/-, etc…tho most of that i THINK only affects transmit…again, i’m just trying to receive thru any local repeater, until i have my call sign).
any suggestions?
I’d check again the offset and the CTCSS tone. Keep in mind that you might have been going through the repeater fine (to the annoyance of those legit users) and simply couldn’t hear it. That happens from time to time and is very annoying - somebody going test test, or key up key up key up and then curses when it doesn’t seem to work (but did!)
In essence - frequency, tone and offset should do the trick. But how will you know if you sorted it without breaking the rules? Tough call.
paulears, first thanks for the reply and suggestions.
FWIW, when i had chirp open, i imported in, directly from repeaterbook, all my local repeaters and their settings. as far as i could tell, checking against repeaterbook later, the settings were correct–offset, +/`, tone, freq. but let me ask, since I have a lot to learn and you bring it up. for tone…there is a transmit tone and (can be) a receive tone, correct? R-CTCS and T-CTCS, as labled under the uv-5r options…also their digital flavors: R-DCS and T-DCS.
if there is a receive tone, do i have to have that set…doesn’t that just break squelch? for about all the repeaters, when i was trying to diagnose this issue, i hit monitor to bypass squelch and just heard static. and for the transmit tone, which i think tells the repeater I’m not noise and re-transmit my signal, I’m not transmitting yet (just got my license yesterday)…so…does tone really affect me being able to simply receive/hear from an active repeater? for offset, isn’t that used for transmitting only?..does it impact receiving? (and that includes i guess both the offset frequency AND the direction, +/-, right).
yes, for sure i need the transmission settings correct and working too, now that i can legally talk on it, but for starters, i wanted to just monitor other transmissions–learn the ropes. i did play w/ the tone settings and–maybe i did something wrong–but that didn’t help.
but thanks for the suggestions, and when i get home, i’ll re-check those settings and make sure again i have them set correct.
You do not have to have a receive tone. I usually set mine to use one (helps with any extraneous noise opening squelch). To begin with, you may not want to use one, until you get it all sorted. Some repeaters do NOT transmit a tone. If you have one set by mistake, you wouldn’t hear the repeater. Repeaterbook is generally a good source of information.
thanks, got it.
but a related follow up question. w/in chirp, i imported from repeaterbook. seemed to work like a champ. but i noticed, when i go directly to repeaterbook.com…pull the same repeaters up for my area…some of these repeaters show both and input and output tone…the output being the tone squelch, i’m assuming. back in chirp, where again i imported from repeaterbook, it will sometimes have “88.5” as the “tonesql”, and not the output tone i see on repeatbook.com–if that makes sense. in fact, about ALL the tonesql values in chirp (imported) show 88.5. (all other settings for a given repeater seem appropriate.) any idea why?
TONESQUL means full tone squelch. It is implied there is both an input and output tone. They don’t need to really list both. TONE just means in input tone.
Sometimes people will list both, or sometimes just the one. It all depends on how the person submitted the info has it listed.
Hope this makes sense.
yes, thanks.
any idea how typical is it, that the repeater will transmit a squelch tone ?
It all depends on the system. Many do, many do not. Until you know for sure, it is best not to enable your radio to have a receive tone.