been licensed for about 6 months now and still feel awkward using alfa bravo charlie etc when giving my call. i hear some guys use it all the time and others hardly ever. when your on 2m repeaters do you really need to spell out your whole call every time? seems like overkill but maybe im missing something

honestly it depends on conditions and who your talking to. if its a clear local repeater contact i usually just give my call normally, but if theres any static or the other guy seems to be having trouble copying then i'll phonetic it out. on hf though especially with dx contacts i use phonetics almost always since accents and qrm can make regular letters really hard to copy

Yeah I was wondering the same thing when I started. Got my tech last year and felt really self conscious about it at first but now i just do whatever feels right for the situation. One thing that helped was listening to how other ops handle it - some will give their call regular first then phonetic if needed. Also learned the hard way that saying "B as in boy" instead of "bravo" just confuses people lol