so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird abbreviations and codes people throw around and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. like QSL i sort of get, its like confirming a contact right? but then theres QRM and QRN and QSB and people just rattle them off like everyone knows what they are. also what about the 73 thing, i see that at the end of basically every message. is there a master list somewhere or do people just memorize all this over time? i feel like im missing half the conversation when i listen to nets

yeah totally normal to feel lost at first, there's a LOT of them and honestly most operators only use like 10-15 regularly. the ones you'll hear most are QSL (confirmed / copy that), QRM which is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like lightning crashes, QSB is when the signal is fading up and down, QTH is your location, QRZ means who is calling me or sometimes just asking who's there. and yeah 73 just means best regards, its been around since like the telegraph days, same with 88 which means love and kisses so dont send that to random people haha. there's an ITU official list online and the ARRL has a good condensed version. after a while it just clicks, you stop thinking about what they mean and just use them

one thing that tripped me up early on was that some of these get used kinda loosely on voice vs cw. like on phone people will just say "QRM" as a word rather than spelling it out, but on cw obviously its sent as the code. also QRP technically means reduce power but in the hobby it basically became shorthand for low power operation in general, like "im a QRP operator" doesnt mean theyre asking you to reduce power it just means they run low watts. context matters a lot with these