so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, got my technician and just upgraded to general last week actually, and i keep hearing people on HF use all these weird codes and abbreviations and honestly i just smile and nod on the radio but i have no clue what half of it means. like QSL i kind of get, it means like confirmed or acknowledged right? and QTH i think is your location? but then people say stuff like QRM and QRN and QSB and i just get lost. and on CW its even worse because its just a wall of letters that i cant parse at all even when i slow it down with the decoder.

is there like a good reference somewhere or does this just come with time? also does anyone actually memorize all of these or do you just pick up the common ones as you go along. someone told me there are like hundreds of official Q codes which seems insane to me

yeah you basically just pick up the common ones over time, nobody memorizes all of them. the full ITU list has like 100+ but in practice on amateur radio you probably only ever hear maybe 20 or 30 of them regularly. you got QSL and QTH right. QRM is interference from other stations, man-made noise basically. QRN is natural noise like lightning static. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, you'll hear someone say "you're getting some QSB" meaning your signal is going up and down. QRZ means "who is calling me" so when someone comes on and says QRZ it usually means they didn't catch the callsign or they're calling CQ and checking if anyone responded. QRP is low power operation, under 5 watts, lots of people are really into that. QRO is the opposite, high power. QSY means change frequency. and then 73 is probably the most used one and it technically isn't even a Q code, it just means best regards or goodbye basically, people have been using it since the telegraph days.

there's a decent reference on the ARRL website and also just searching "amateur radio Q codes" will get you a PDF you can print out. keep it near the radio for a while, it'll sink in faster than you think once you start hearing them in context.

oh man i was in the exact same spot not too long ago. the one that tripped me up forever was QRO vs QRP because i kept mixing them up. also QRX which means standby or wait a moment, i never heard that one explained and just thought something was wrong with my radio lol. also people say "73" and "88" sometimes, 88 is like love and kisses and you hear it said to spouses or significant others which is kind of charming honestly. and OM means old man which sounds rude but its just what guys call each other, and YL is young lady which is what they call female operators. XYL is supposedly ex-young lady meaning wife. yeah the lingo is a lot at first but it really does just click after a while of being on the air