Well, I don't see anything wrong with "monitoring".  After all, if
you're kind of interested in talking to anybody you probably will
indeed be monitoring to see if anybody comes back or whatever.  I
suppose you could call cqcq and give your call and then say monitoring,
but that's probably overkill to say the least. <smile>

Or you could also say something like:

"this is W6SMB on channel; anybody around?"

But then I suppose we could get into a discussion of whether you're on
frequency or chanel, at which point I think I'll just go back to 20 cw.

Don W6SMB