You could write a college paper on the etiquette of radio operation! In fact, this is where many new hams, and to be fair, radio operators of all kinds, have problems. The biggest one is that formality works for you or against you and getting it correct, for your local repeater depends on reading tiny things. The FCC and OFCOM in the UK insist on certain features, that often get dropped once people know who you are. A good one is simply callsigns - Clearly following rules for some brief overs gets a bit silly. Deciding what a transmission is, is the key - is it a conversation, or each individual press to talk, or what? You often hear ridiculous phrases - M1ABC from G4ABC - YES - M1ABC from G4ABC Over. Most well established repeater groups might end up with Yes - G4ABC, leaving the others to fill in the missing info - which of course they already know. Other repeaters can be much more formal. I'm in Belfast at the moment and found a charged radio, dialled in the GB3NI repeater and discovered lots of chatty people, but all using pretty formal procedure - so if I had joined in, I'd have copied their habits and style.
It's very useful to use airband for ear training. A very regulated and non-chatty system. Pick a busy channel and listen to how they do it. Try to spot the new pilots and the old pilots by how they speak, see how they can slip callsigns in almost without thinking. Listen how they leave small gaps where others could, if necessary break in - this is important on ham repeaters. How do the locals take new stations joining in - the procedure is rarely written down, but often is simply somebody saying their callsign and then shutting up, waiting to be invited in - those attempting to join with long winded "hello, this is M1ABC in XYZ running 25W into a 3dB gain vertical" often get, er, not heard!
There is often a heirachy too, which to a newcomer is NOT evident, but the clues are there. Sounds a bit weird, but some repeaters and radio groups do have a pips on the shoulder kind of attitude, and it takes a while to work these out.
If I ever join in with a group of people having a chat, I always start very briefly - waiting to see how they wish me to progress. With time, it gets better. If you want to hear bad behaviour, then tune in to an HF contest, where everyone is trying to get in at the same time. You can learn a lot from how the successful ones do this.
Big learning curve - and you WILL upset at least the occasional old lag, by not knowing he funded the repeater aerial you are using ten years ago, which gives him a leg up on everyone else.
If their operating procedure is not what you were taught, then sadly, you have to become like them to fit in.
Last night somebody called and called and called - and it became very annoying. Somebody else popped up, and within ten minutes there were four or five people all having a QSO - not including the person who endlessly called, who I think realised he'd been a real pain.
