so i just got my technician a few months ago and ive been on 2m mostly doing local repeater stuff. i notice some people use the full NATO phonetics like Alpha Bravo Charlie and others just kind of say the letter. like i heard a guy on the repeater last week just say his callsign as letters without phonetics and nobody seemed confused but then on another net they were really strict about doing full phonetics every time.

i guess my question is when are you supposed to use them vs when is it ok to just say the letter. is there a rule about it or is it just whatever the net prefers. also is it always NATO or can you use other ones because i heard someone say something like "E for Edward" which i dont think is the NATO word for E

There's no hard rule in Part 97 that says you have to use phonetics at all, it's more of a best practice thing. The idea is just that certain letters sound really similar over the air, especially on HF when propagation is rough — B D E G P T V all blur together on a noisy band. On a clear local repeater it usually doesn't matter much so people get lazy about it and honestly thats fine.

For formal nets, emergency traffic, and anything involving passing messages or handling third party traffic you really want to stick to NATO because the other end of the contact might be writing it down and you dont want them guessing. The ITU actually standardizes the NATO alphabet for exactly that reason — it was designed so each word sounds distinct even through static and accents.

As for "E for Edward" — that's the old phonetic alphabet, pre-NATO. Some older hams still use words from that era out of habit. It works fine but if you're talking to someone who learned the NATO system they might have to think for a second. Just learn the standard NATO ones and you'll be understood everywhere.

yeah on casual ragchew stuff on a local repeater nobody really cares, i almost never bother unless my callsign is getting garbled. but i did a SKYWARN net during a storm last year and the net control was pretty firm about phonetics for everything including street names and it actually made a huge difference because conditions were bad and there was a lot of background noise on some of the portables.

i still mix up Foxtrot and Foxfire sometimes under pressure lol. old habits