About a half hour ago, I fired up the 2m rig and called “KB6NU listening.” Right away, I got a response from a friend in our club. “Good morning,” he said, “How are you today”? He didn’t give his callsign, but I knew who it was from his distinctive voice.
“I’m great,” I replied, “but you should give your callsign to be legal.”
“I’m sorry,” my friend said, “I thought you only had to id every ten minutes and at the end of a contact. Almost immediately, a third station broke in confirming this.
Of course, I had to confirm this. I went to the ARRL website, which has the text of Part 97. Sure enough, Part 97.119, Station Identification states:
(a) Each amateur station, except a space station or telecommand station, must transmit its assigned call sign on its transmitting channel at the end of each communication, and at least every ten minutes during a communication, for the purpose of clearly making the source of the transmissions from the station known to those receiving the transmissions. No station may transmit unidentified communications or signals, or transmit as the station call sign, any call sign not authorized to the station.
Note that nowhere does it require that you identify at the start of a communication.
There’s more there, and I’d suggest that you have a look. There are other station identification requirements that you probably should know. For example, when operating a special event station, you must not only identify with the special event station call, but also your own call once every hour.
You learn something new every day….
Yes, I just learned about this rule this year myself after being a ham since 1979. I have always ID’d at the beginning myself and I think I always will. It’s funny how we bring our HF practices with us to VHF/UHF. I think the reason we do that on HF since we do not have the familiarity that we do on VHF/UHF. When I’m on HF they are more often than not people I have never met before and therefore they need to know my callsign.
I personally like it since I don’t always remember who belongs to which voice. Having them say the callsign helps remind me who they are. And for them to come back with “Good morning,†he said, “How are you todayâ€? Does not tell me if they are licensed or just picked up someone stolen radio. I like to know who I’m talking to. They are presuming that you know their voice. They could have at least said their name like “Good morning, this is Joe [callsign]”.