Chilli Monster:
Actually that's "Contact" for those civil reading
We had a mil ATCO try to explain this (very briefly) at a MCASD today and I thought I had it but now you've gone and got me all confused again.
What the man told us was something along the lines of:
No contact between the controllers: "freecall"
Details passed but not a formal handover: "continue with"
Radar handover: "contact"
Is that correct, for military controllers?
Then you seem to be saying civil controllers never use the term "freecall". I'm pretty sure they use it regularly at least at the civil unit I fly from.
You know this is an area where pilot knowledge is really very poor and it strikes me that if the pilots getting the service don't know the significance of the words, why bother using them?
NS