I actually thought about getting an amateur radio licence at one time too. It was a ride in a friend's car that started changing my mind. The friend has a bunch of scanners going all the time and a bunch of ham radio operators did this check in thing. I asked what this was and the friend explained that they routinely do this. I couldn't stop laughing because it sounded like they were taking attendance at school.
Hams are required by the regulations to state their callsigns at intervals of (usually) 10 minutes or less.
What you heard was probably a "Net", on 2m FM.
These, are often, effectively, "club meetings", so people 'log in' for the club records, but even informal Nets often like each station to check in, as a "round table" conference becomes seriously unwieldy if you can't remember who is next, so it is normally the function of the control station to "call the roll."
In passing, hams would think someone with a bunch of scanners in their car to be a bit "geeky".
On another occasion, one ham operator was moaning about how everyone was complaining that they had a hard time hearing him. His audio was clean but very quiet. My first thought was that he was undermodulated from the way it sounded. The other guys he was talking with kept saying he was very quiet. I kept saying to my friend that it sounds undermodulated, what does the index of modulation look like and the other ham operators kept saying, dunno, sounds quiet, don't know why and left this guy swinging in the breeze. Nobody recommended checking out the audio chain and making sure everything was set up so his normal speaking voice would bring his transmitter up to 90% or so modulation or took a look with a spectrum analyzer to see what his RF output looked like. TinySA aren't expensive. None of the people this guy was speaking with could or would offer any troubleshooting tips to help get him started chasing down why his audio was so low. The unhelpful indifference was striking.
The "audio chain" in many ham radio transceivers is probably a couple of transistors,either discrete, or part of an IC, so it would all come back to maybe a faulty, or incorrect mic, or maybe a coupling capacitor.
Again, if you were hearing him on a scanner, he was quite likely to be on 2m FM, so it would be deviation you would be looking at.
Some people can get a pretty good idea of deviation of a speech modulated signal from looking at a spectrum analyser but the usual method is replace the mic with an audio generator, either for a better estimate, or to look for Bessel "zeros".
A deviation meter is normally used for simple FM signals in industry.
Hams may well not have the equipment to measure deviation, & perforce, must take the manufacturer's settings as being correct, & assume any drop in deviation to be due to an audio fault.
Another possibility is that his radio is set to a lower deviation standard than the others in the group.
There are several of these, & equipment still in commercial service or recently repurposed is usually set to the lower deviations.
There were a few other things that shifted my view on amateur radio but the hamfests finished the idea off for me.
As for showers, the utility bills have these styleized meter gauge graphs and the one for water consumption is consistently in the yellow. There's no such thing as a short shower for me. And clean clothes. Definitely. And I prefer coveralls to overalls.