so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly do 2m FM through a local repeater. when i give my callsign i usually just say the letters like november, alfa, whatever but sometimes i hear guys on there just making up their own words for letters and it sounds fine nobody corrects them or anything. like one guy always says "easy" for E instead of echo and another dude says "sugar" for S. is there actually a rule about this or is it just kind of a preference thing? i dont want to be doing it wrong but i also dont want to be the phonetic police either lol. my elmer told me to always use NATO but he also said a lot of things that turned out to be more like suggestions than actual rules

yeah there's no FCC rule that says you have to use NATO phonetics specifically, at least not for amateur radio. it's different for aviation and some other services but for ham you're just required to identify, not HOW you identify as long as its intelligible. that said NATO became standard for a reason — if you're working someone with a heavy accent or in a pile up the standardized words are way less ambiguous. "sugar" vs "sierra" doesnt matter on a quiet local repeater but try working DX on HF with weird phonetics and people will start asking you to repeat. the guys who use their own phonetics on local FM are fine for that context but id learn the NATO ones properly first just so its muscle memory when you actually need it

honestly when i first got my ticket i was so stressed about saying the right phonetics i would blank on letters mid-callsign which was way more embarassing than saying the wrong word. my advice just practice the NATO ones until they come automatically and dont overthink it. i still slip up occasionally and say something random for a letter and nobody has ever made a big deal about it on any repeater ive used. the only time ive seen people actually care is in nets where the net control is trying to get a clean log and even then they just ask you to repeat