okay so i just got my technician license a couple months ago and ive been lurking on local repeaters mostly but ive started actually keying up a bit. one thing thats been confusing me is the phonetic alphabet stuff. like i know the NATO ones, alpha bravo charlie etc, but ive heard people on the air using completely different words sometimes? like i heard a guy say "Adam" instead of Alpha and "Boy" instead of Bravo and i wasnt sure if he was doing it wrong or if theres some other system im not aware of. is there a rule about which one you have to use or is it more of a just use whatever works thing. i dont want to sound like an idiot on the air but i also dont want to correct someone whos been doing this for 30 years lol

yeah what you heard was probably the old APCO phonetics, they were used a lot by law enforcement and older hams before NATO became the standard everybody settled on. Adam Boy Charles David Edward and so on. some old timers still use them out of habit, especially guys who came up through public safety or learned back in the 60s and 70s. theres no FCC rule saying you HAVE to use NATO specifically, the regs just say you need to identify your station, they dont mandate which phonetic system you use. that said NATO is pretty much universal now and if youre working DX or any kind of contest or just talking to someone in another country, NATO is what they'll expect. on a local repeater with regulars it doesnt really matter much, people will understand either way. i'd just stick with NATO, its what everyone learns now and youll never confuse anybody with it.

so anyway this is something that tripped me up too when i first started. i actually made up my own phonetics for a while because i kept blanking on the real ones mid-transmission which is embarassing. like i'd get to X and just completely freeze. the thing that helped me was just using them every single time i gave my callsign, even on the local repeater where nobody probably needed it spelled out, just to drill it in. after a few weeks it was totally automatic. and yeah the Adam Boy thing is definitely the old system, my elmer used those sometimes and it took me a minute to figure out what was going on the first time i heard it