so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do 2m FM on local repeaters and occasionally some HF when conditions are decent. one thing i keep going back and forth on is when youre supposed to use phonetics vs just saying the letter. like if someone asks me to confirm a letter in my callsign i always do the full NATO thing, Kilo Foxtrot whatever, but sometimes on the repeater i hear guys just say the actual letter and it sounds totally fine. is there like an actual rule or is it just feel for the situation? i know DX contacts are different but im talking more everyday stuff. also sometimes i second guess myself mid-transmission because i cant remember if its Sierra or Sugar for S... i know its Sierra but my brain freezes up sometimes

honestly for casual FM repeater chat you can pretty much do whatever works, nobody is gonna call the FCC on you for saying the letter B instead of Bravo lol. the phonetics really matter when youre in a noisy situation or working a weak signal where one wrong letter could mess up a callsign or a piece of info. on HF especially when theres QRM or a station is barely above the noise floor thats when you really want to nail the NATO stuff because Bravo and Delta sound nothing alike even in static but B and D can both disappear into noise and become the same mush. i went through the whole thing when i was starting out, just keep using the real NATO ones and eventually they wire themselves into your brain. Sugar is not a thing by the way, thats the old phonetics from before the NATO standard got sorted out in the 50s. Sierra is correct and will always be correct

yeah same boat as you when i started, i used to keep a little cheat sheet taped next to my radio which felt embarrassing but whatever it worked. the thing that helped me most was just listening to a lot of HF traffic and net operations because the experienced ops use them so automatically it starts to sink in. i think the freezing up mid-transmission thing goes away after a while, now i dont even think about it. one weird thing i noticed is some older hams still use like Golf or George interchangeably and dont really care, but if youre doing anything formal like ARES nets or traffic handling they do expect proper NATO phonetics and they will gently correct you if you slip up