ok so ive been listening a lot lately and just got my technician last month and i keep hearing all this stuff like QSL and QRZ and QRM and i kind of get some of it from context but honestly its confusing and theres like a hundred of them apparently. also on FT8 everyone is using these other abbreviations i dont even know where to start. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of learn them over time by osmosis? and do i actually need to know all of them or just the common ones. someone on a local net used QNI last night and i had no idea what that meant

yeah theres a lot of them honestly and most hams probably only use maybe 20-30 regularly. the ones youll hear constantly are QSL which just means confirmed or acknowledged, QRZ is whos calling or sometimes used as like a who is that on the frequency, QRM is interference from other stations, QSB is signal fading, QTH is your location, and QRP means low power operation. QSY means change frequency which is handy. you dont need to memorize the whole ITU Q code list, its huge and a lot of them are maritime or aviation stuff that nobody in ham radio ever uses.

as for QNI specifically thats a net thing, it means net check-in, so like you say your callsign and QNI to let the net control know youre joining. different nets have their own little conventions too so it can vary a bit. honestly the best thing is just keep a cheat sheet handy for a while, i did that for probably my first year and nobody cares if you have to look something up

FT8 abbreviations are a whole separate rabbit hole lol, like RRR and RR73 and 73 are all slightly different things and new people get them mixed up all the time. 73 just means best regards or kind of like goodbye, its not a Q code its just old telegraph shorthand that stuck around. RR73 in FT8 means received and goodbye basically, confirms the contact is done. i messed this up my first few weeks and kept sending wrong messages in sequences