so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep seeing people throw around stuff like QSL, QRM, QTH and honestly theres like a hundred of them and i dont know where to start. i know QSL means like confirming a contact or something and QTH is your location but beyond that im totally lost. like what does QSB mean and why do people say 73 at the end of everything, is that a Q code too or something different. also sometimes i see people write things like OM or YL and i dont think those are Q codes but idk. basically just trying to get a handle on the shorthand because it feels like everyone else just knows this stuff and i missed the memo

haha yeah it can be a lot at first but honestly you only end up using maybe a dozen of them regularly. QSB is signal fading, like when someones signal is going up and down, pretty useful one to know. QRM is interference from other stations and QRN is natural noise like static from lightning etc. QRP means low power which you'll see a lot of people talking about. and yeah 73 isnt a Q code, its just an old telegraph abbreviation that stuck around, means best regards basically. OM just means old man which is kind of an affectionate term for any male ham regardless of age lol, and YL is young lady which is used for any female operator. dont stress about memorizing all of them, the ones you hear on air youll just pick up naturally after a while

QSB drove me crazy when I first started because I kept thinking people were saying something was broken when they mentioned it but really they just meant the signal was fading out. one thing that helped me was just keeping a little cheat sheet next to the radio for the first few months. also QRZ means whos calling me or sometimes you'll see it as the name of that card confirming website which is a bit confusing. 73 is definitely not a Q code but its everywhere, some people even say 88 which means love and kisses, mostly used between certain operators. the Q codes actually came from maritime and aviation use way before ham radio so theres a ton of obscure ones nobody ever uses