ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, general class, and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird shorthand things people use and i only know a handful of them. like i know QSL means confirm and QRM is interference from other stations but then someone told me QRM is specifically man-made interference and QRN is natural stuff like lightning and i didnt even know there was a difference before that.

and then on digital modes especially like FT8 theres even more shorthand that doesnt seem to be the same as the Q codes at all. plus people on SSB just kind of shorten everything like theyll say 73 and i know thats goodbye but someone said 88 the other day and i had no idea what that meant until i looked it up later. are there like common ones i really need to know just to have a normal conversation on the air, or do i just pick them up over time? feels like everyone assumes you already know all this stuff

you mostly just pick them up over time honestly, but theres a handful you really do need to know early on or youll be lost. QRZ is probably the most common one youll hear on voice, it basically means "who is calling me" or sometimes just used to call CQ in a roundabout way. QSY means change frequency, QRT means youre shutting down or stopping transmission, QTH is your location. those four right there will cover a huge chunk of what you hear day to day.

the 88 thing is kind of old school ham slang for "love and kisses" and its usually used between people who know each other well or sometimes toward a female operator, though you dont hear it as much anymore. 73 is best regards basically, not really goodbye specifically even though everyone uses it that way. and yeah 55 means good luck but almost nobody uses that one. the Q codes go way back to maritime and telegraph days so theres a whole long list of them but most are pretty obscure and you wont hear half of them in regular use.

dont stress about memorizing all of them at once, I tried to do that when i started and it just made my head spin. the ones that come up constantly on HF SSB for me are QRM, QRN, QSB which is signal fading, QRP which most people know means low power operation, and QRO is high power. QSK is full break-in CW if you ever get into morse. honestly just keep a little cheat sheet next to your radio for a while, thats what i did for the first year and nobody on the air knows or cares