so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i notice on the air some people go full NATO every single time they give their callsign like whiskey-four-tango-romeo-alpha or whatever and some people just say their call normally like they'd say a word. im not sure when youre supposed to do one vs the other. my elmer told me to always use phonetics but then i listened to a net last week and half the people just rattled off their calls without spelling anything out phonetically.

also is it bad if i mix them up, like i know most of the NATO ones but sometimes i blank on a letter and i end up saying something random that isnt the official word. does that matter or do people not really care as long as its clear

honestly the "always use phonetics" advice is good when youre starting out because it just avoids confusion, especially on HF where conditions can make calls hard to copy. on a local 2m repeater with people you talk to every week yeah most folks just say their call normally because everyone already knows who you are.

as for mixing up the words, nobody is going to yell at you over it. the whole point is clarity so if you blank on Golf and say George instead the world isnt going to end. that said its worth just drilling the standard ones because after a while they become totally automatic and you stop thinking about it. i used to stumble on November and Uniform for some reason but now i dont even think about it. just takes time.

yeah what he said. i'll add that in contest operating people barely use phonetics half the time because exchanges are so short and fast, but if conditions are rough or someones call has letters that sound alike like B and D or M and N then phonetics actually save a lot of back and forth. i once spent like three QSOs trying to sort out whether a suffix was BD or VD before we both just switched to spelling it out properly. cost me probably 2 minutes in a rate contest which is annoying lol