High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In telecommunications, Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System or CTCSS is a circuit that is used to reduce the annoyance of listening to other users on a shared two-way radio communications channel. It is sometimes called tone squelch. Where more than one user group is on the same channel (called co-channel users), CTCSS filters out other users if they are using a different CTCSS tone or no CTCSS.