okay so ive been listening to a lot of ham radio conversations lately and everyone keeps throwing around these short codes and abbreviations and honestly i cant keep up. like what is QSL exactly, i see it used as a verb sometimes and a confirmation other times? and QTH i think is location? but then theres QRM QRN QSB and like a dozen others and i dont know where to look these up in a way that actually makes sense in context.

also people sometimes just say 73 at the end of a conversation which i gather is like goodbye but where did that even come from. and whats the deal with OM and YL, are those like ranks or something. sorry if this is a really dumb question im still pretty new to all of this and the lingo is a bit overwhelming when youre just starting out

Not a dumb question at all, everyone goes through this. So QSL technically means "I confirm" or "can you confirm" depending on context, it comes from old telegraph and maritime radio days when operators needed quick shorthand. When someone says "QSL that" they mean they understood and confirm what you said, and a QSL card is just a physical confirmation that a contact happened.

QTH is your location yeah, QRM is interference from other stations (man-made), QRN is natural static like from a thunderstorm, QSB is signal fading. There's a whole list of them going back to the early 1900s. The ITU formalized a bunch of them but hams kind of adopted their own favorites over the years.

73 means best regards, it's one of the oldest telegraph codes and nobody really uses most of the old numeric codes anymore but 73 stuck around. Sometimes you hear 88 which means love and kisses, usually sent to a YL which just means young lady, basically any woman on the air regardless of age. OM is old man, same deal, just means any male operator. Not ranks, just friendly informal terms that have been used forever.

yeah i was totally lost on this stuff when i started too. one thing that helped me was just jumping on a local repeater and listening for a few weeks, you kinda pick up what things mean from context. like you hear someone say QSY and then the frequency changes so you figure out QSY means move to another frequency. same with QRZ, someone will say it when they didnt catch who was calling and suddenly it clicks that it means who is calling me.

theres a pdf floating around online that lists all the common ham Q codes, i forget where i found it but searching for ARRL Q codes should get you something useful. the ones you actually hear most often on the air are probably only like 10 or 15 of them anyway, the rest are pretty obscure