so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do 2m fm through a local repeater and occasionally some HF when conditions are decent. i know the NATO phonetic alphabet, like Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but i feel kind of weird using it all the time because sometimes it seems like overkill? like if someone asks me to repeat my callsign and its pretty clear already do i still spell it out phonetically every single time or is there some unwritten rule about when you do and dont bother

also i was listening to a net the other night and one guy kept using non-standard phonetics, like he said "America" instead of Alpha and "Boston" instead of Bravo and nobody said anything so i wasnt sure if thats actually fine or if its frowned upon. genuinely dont know the etiquette here and didnt want to ask on the air and look dumb

honestly the general rule most people follow is if theres any chance of confusion, use phonetics. on a quiet repeater with good signal and a short callsign its pretty common to just say the letters normally, nobody's going to call the police on you. but on HF especially when theres QSB or noise or youre working someone whos not a native english speaker, phonetics really do save a ton of back and forth. ive had contacts where i said my suffix three times as plain letters and they still had it wrong, switched to phonetics and got it first try

as for the non-standard stuff, technically ITU and most procedural guidance says you should use the standard NATO phonetics because theyre designed to be unambiguous across different languages and accents. "America" and "Boston" type phonetics are kind of an old habit some guys never dropped, its not a huge deal on a casual ragchew but in emergency communications or any kind of formal net they can cause real problems because not everyone has the same associations. some emcomm nets will actually correct you on it. so id just stick with the standard ones, takes a bit to get them automatic but then you dont have to think about it

the America Boston thing drives me a little crazy not gonna lie, i know its not worth getting worked up over but when im in a busy contest or a pileup and someone throws out a weird phonetic i have to actually stop and parse it instead of it just clicking automatically. thats kind of the whole point of having a standard set right

for your question about when to use them, i basically default to always using them for my callsign the first time i say it in any exchange and then judge from there depending on how clean the copy is