ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and still kind of confused about phonetics. like i know the NATO ones, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc., but i see people on the air just saying letters sometimes without phonetics and other times going full phonetic alphabet for everything. is there a rule about this or is it just feel? like if someone asks for my callsign do i always spell it out phonetically or only when theres QRM or whatever. also sometimes i hear people using non-standard ones, heard a guy say "America" instead of Alpha the other day which threw me off a bit. just trying to figure out the actual convention here because i dont want to sound weird on air

pretty much comes down to conditions and context. on a quiet 2m repeater where everyones coming in 5x5 you can just say your call normally and people will hear it fine. but if theres any noise, interference, weak signal, whatever, you drop into phonetics so theres no confusion between say M and N or B and D. those sound almost identical in a QSB fade.

the non-standard phonetics thing is just old habit from some guys who learned before NATO got standardized or picked up regional variations. it works fine domestically but if youre ever doing any DX or working someone whos not a native English speaker the NATO set is way better because its designed so the key sounds survive bad audio. America vs Alpha isnt a huge deal on a local repeater but try it with a JA station on 20m and you might cause confusion. stick with standard and youll be fine, nobody thinks its weird, its actually more professional sounding tbh

yeah same thing confused me when i started. what i do now is i just use phonetics whenever i'm not 100% sure the other op heard me right, or if its my first transmission with someone new. better to over-phonetic than have them ask you to repeat 3 times lol. the non-standard ones are kind of a pet peeve of mine honestly, heard someone use "sugar" for S last week on a net and it just sounds sloppy to me now that im used to Sierra