ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now (tech) and ive been checking into the local 2m net on tuesday nights pretty regularly which has been fun. but last week something happened that kind of confused me and i want to make sure im not being rude without knowing it.

so the net control called for check-ins and i gave my call sign and said i had a comment. they acknowledged me and i started talking but i guess i went on a bit long? like maybe 2-3 minutes just sharing something i thought was interesting about a kit i was building. nobody said anything but afterward one of the older guys messaged me on the club email list and said i should keep comments brief during a net. i wasnt sure if he was being helpful or telling me off lol.

is there like an unwritten rule about how long you're supposed to talk during a net check-in? i genuinely didnt know and i dont want to be that guy who hogs the frequency. also is it rude to just say your callsign and nothing else, like no name or location? some people do that and some people add a bunch of info and i cant figure out what the standard is supposed to be.

dont worry too much about it, you didnt commit some huge sin or anything. nets do vary a lot though — a traffic net runs very differently from a casual ragchew net and it sounds like yours might be somewhere in the middle. the general idea is that net control is trying to move through the check-in list efficiently so everyone gets heard, especially if there's a long list or the net has a specific purpose beyond just chatting.

2-3 minutes on a single comment during a busy check-in round can slow things down quite a bit, especially if there are 15 or 20 stations waiting. the usual thing is to keep your initial comment to maybe 30 seconds or so and then if people are interested the net control will often open it up for more discussion after the formal check-ins are done. a lot of nets have a "rag chew" period at the end for exactly that reason.

and no, just giving your callsign is perfectly fine for some nets, especially traffic nets. for more social nets people usually add their name and maybe signal report but its not required. the guy who emailed you was almost certainly just trying to help, older hams tend to be pretty direct about that kind of stuff and its worth taking it as friendly advice rather than a scolding.

yeah i had almost the exact same experience when i first started checking in to our Wednesday night net. felt so awkward afterward. one thing that helped me was just listening for a few weeks before i ever checked in, you kind of pick up the rhythm of how that specific net runs.

every net really does have its own culture honestly. some are super formal with a net manager and structured agenda and some are basically just a roundtable with a loose format. once i figured out which type ours was it got way easier to know how much to say.