Ah, things have changed indeed. When I was doing this stuff, long long ago, in high school, the monitoring station was 3 blocks from my home. I remember feeling this vague sense of nervousness every time I passed by it. There were stories of them raiding illegal transceivers and making people pay fines etc. They were more feared than the CIA these days, lol. Not sure if these were just urban legends but we were quite terrified of them!

Do you just make up a callsign?