so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF and some local 2m stuff and i noticed some guys use phonetics for everything and some guys barely use them at all. like on my local repeater people just say their callsign normally without spelling it out phonetically but then on 40m SSB everyone seems to go full NATO alphabet every time they give their call. is there like an actual rule about this or is it just a convention thing? also sometimes i hear people using non-standard words like saying Sugar instead of Sierra or King instead of Kilo which throws me off when im trying to copy a call. just wondering how strict people are about this in practice

yeah theres no hard rule that says you MUST use NATO phonetics, the FCC just says you gotta ID with your callsign, doesnt specify how. the phonetics thing is really just about making sure the other station copies you correctly. on a local repeater with a strong signal and people you talk to every week, nobody needs you to say Whiskey Alpha five Romeo Romeo or whatever because they already know who you are. on HF though especially DX or when bands are noisy its a completely different story, a garbled callsign means a busted contact or at minimum asking for repeats which slows everything down.

the non-standard phonetics thing is kind of a pet peeve of mine honestly. some older guys learned different words back in the day and just never switched, and some people think being creative is charming i guess. but if youre trying to work a station in Japan at 0200 UTC with QRM on both sides, hearing someone say Sugar instead of Sierra genuinely causes confusion. stick to NATO, its what the whole world agreed on for a reason.

i was curious about this same thing when i started. what i ended up doing was just listening to a lot of HF before i started transmitting much and you kind of pick up when it feels right to use them. contest ops basically rattle off calls with phonetics at like a hundred miles an hour which took me a while to follow but now it clicks. one thing i'll say is even on VHF if the band is acting weird or somebodys having trouble copying me ill just throw phonetics in, it takes two extra seconds and usually clears things right up