If you have a handheld radio and live in almost any populated area in Canada, you can reach a repeater to have your signal rebroadcast with much more power and much farther away.

If the repeater supports IRLP, you can connect to other repeaters around the world by punching in tones – just like the touch-tones on your phone – to manage the connections. Those tones are known as DTMF tones, and most modern radios support them, even though many users don’t know about them.

As an example, our page on the Baofeng UV-B6 hand-held radio has a section on how to generate the DTMF tones, and how to connect to repeaters. Configuration and tone generation is similar for many other radios – but check your manual to see how your radio does it.

Our repeater page tells you how repeaters work, how to find them,  and how to connect to them.

If you picked a repeater that supports IRLP, or if you are looking for one, our repeater IRLP page tells you how to find them, make connections, and monitor the connections over the Internet.

Happy repeating and linking!