Phonetics, Figure Code, Q-Codes and Abbreviations

This is the densest lesson in Section B for marks per minute of study. The syllabus does not say “know some phonetics”; it names Appendix 14 and then prints an exact list of thirty Q-codes and seventeen abbreviations, and the examiner asks straight out of that list. There is no reasoning to do and no formula to derive — everything here is either known or not known. Learn it properly and you have secured a large slice of Section B before you sit down. The same material is also what makes you intelligible on the air, which matters more than the marks.

Why a phonetic alphabet exists at all

Picture the 2 m repeater on a weekday evening in Bengaluru: you are mobile on the Outer Ring Road, the windows are down, the signal is just holding into the repeater, and you give your call sign as “VU3 B C D”. The other operator writes down “VU3 P T D” and you spend the next three overs sorting it out.

That failure is not carelessness. English has a set of letters — B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V and Z — that share the same long “ee” vowel and differ only in a consonant at the front lasting a few tens of milliseconds. That consonant carries very little energy and sits high in the audio spectrum, exactly where a narrow FM channel, a noisy repeater input and road noise do their worst damage. The vowel survives; the consonant does not. So all nine letters arrive as the same sound.

A code word solves this by redundancy. “Bravo” is two loud syllables with a distinctive rhythm; even if half of it is chewed off by a squelch tail, no other word in the list could have produced what is left. That is why the words were chosen by testing them over bad circuits rather than by picking pretty names.

The ITU phonetic alphabet — Appendix 14

Learn the code words first and the pronunciation second. In the pronunciation column below, the syllable in bold is the one the ITU marks as stressed — say it a little louder and a little longer than its neighbours.

Three spellings are deliberate and are examined. Alfa has no “ph”, because in many languages “ph” is not read as an “f” sound. Juliett ends in two letters t, so that a French speaker does not leave the final t silent. Whiskey carries the e.

The figure code

Almost nobody learns this half, and the syllabus names it explicitly alongside the letters. It is free marks.

There is a pattern that makes the whole table memorable in about a minute. Every word is a prefix followed by the English digit: NADA-ZERO, UNA-ONE, BISSO-TWO, TERRA-THREE, KARTE-FOUR, PANTA-FIVE, SOXI-SIX, SETTE-SEVEN, OKTO-EIGHT, NOVE-NINE. That is deliberate: a listener who loses the prefix to a burst of noise still hears the digit. The prefixes are loosely Romance-language number words, which is why they feel half familiar.

So 14.250 MHz is spoken UNAONE KARTEFOUR DECIMAL BISSOTWO PANTAFIVE NADAZERO, and VU2ABC is Victor Uniform Bissotwo Alfa Bravo Charlie.

When is it actually used? In everyday amateur practice, hardly ever — Indian amateurs say “Victor Uniform three Echo X-ray Juliett” and speak the digit plainly. The figure code belongs to distress and safety working, where the ITU recommends Appendix 14 under RR No. 32.7, and to the test transmissions your licence conditions describe: for a voice test you send the figures 1, 2, 3, 4 in the figure code, which is the telephony equivalent of the CW operator's VVV. And it belongs, without exception, to the examination paper. When a question says “in full ITU phonetics and figure code”, the answer with the plain digit in it is the wrong one.

Q-codes: three letters that carry a sentence

The Q-code was invented for commercial radiotelegraphy, where every character cost time and money and the operators at the two ends often had no language in common. Three letters beginning with Q stand for a whole sentence, and mean the same to a Norwegian operator as to a Tamil one.

The rule that decides whether a Q-code is a question or an answer is simple, and it is examinable:

• On CW, a Q-code followed by a question mark is a question. QRL? asks “are you busy?”
• On phone, a Q-code followed by RQ is a question. “QRL RQ” asks the same thing. (Most amateurs simply use a rising tone of voice, but RQ is the ITU form.)
• With neither, it is a statement, an answer or an order. QRL on its own means “I am busy”.

You can also force a yes or no by sending the letter C (“Charlie”, meaning yes) or the letters NO immediately after the abbreviation.

Two things to notice as you read the table. Several codes carry a numbered scale, and the examiner likes those numbers. And the ITU wording is written from the point of view of the station asking — QRM asks “is my transmission being interfered with?”, not “are you being interfered with?” You are asking the other operator to report on what he hears from you.

The seven pairs that are actually confused

Nobody loses marks on QRT. Marks are lost on pairs that look alike and mean opposite things. Fix each pair with its hook and the rest of the table stops being frightening.

QSX is worth a second look, because it is the one that costs a beginner a contact. When a rare DX station sends QSX 14 205, it is not going to 14 205 kHz. It is listening on 14 205 kHz while continuing to transmit on its own frequency. You call on 14 205. This is split-frequency working, and it is the only sane way to handle a pile-up.

Where amateur usage has drifted from the ITU original

The ITU text is maritime. Amateurs have bent three of the codes, and the exam expects you to know the ITU meaning while the air expects the amateur one.

• QRZ? — ITU: “Who is calling me?” That is still exactly what it means, and it is what you send when you heard a call but not the call sign. What amateurs have added is the habit of sending QRZ? alone to mean “anyone else for me?” after finishing a contact. Also note it does not mean “what is your call sign?” — asking that is CS?.
• QSL — ITU: “I am acknowledging receipt.” Amateurs use it as a verb (“QSL on that” = understood) and as a noun: the QSL card, the written confirmation of a contact, sent direct or through a QSL bureau.
• QTH — ITU: latitude and longitude. Amateurs give a town, and often a grid square instead; the grid square tool converts between the two. The ITU wording “or according to any other indication” is what makes that legitimate.
• QRL? — the ITU meaning is “Are you busy?”, and amateurs have made it the standard enquiry before taking a frequency: listen, then send QRL?, then listen again. Doing that is how you comply with the licence condition that you must ensure your emissions will not interfere with transmissions already in progress.
• QTR — amateurs always exchange time in UTC, never in IST, however local the contact. Your log, by contrast, is kept in IST.
• QUM — in an emergency net this is the announcement that ordinary traffic may start again.

The seventeen abbreviations

These are the operating signals the syllabus lists by name. Most are CW usages, but several have direct voice equivalents you will hear on any Indian repeater.

AA, AB, WA and WB are all requests for a repetition, and all four take the same grammar as a Q-code: a question mark after them on CW, or RQ after them on phone. Nest them in your memory as a two-by-two grid — all or one word, crossed with after or before.

The ones sent as a single character

AR, AS, VA and K are prosigns: in Morse they are sent with no gap between the letters, so they form one long character rather than two. Printed texts show this with a bar over the pair.

Drill it, do not read it

Reading a table of thirty Q-codes teaches recognition. The paper tests recall, and a contact needs recall in under a second. The drill below runs each deck until the pile is empty, and any card you get wrong comes straight back round — so the remaining count stops falling exactly where your real gaps are. Run each deck both ways: code to meaning first, then meaning to code, which is harder and more useful.

For the phonetics specifically, the phonetics tool will spell out any call sign or word for you — put your own call sign into it and say the result aloud until it is automatic, because that is the string you will use most. And if you intend to go for the General grade later, the CW trainer will drill these same prosigns at speed, where AR and VA stop being table entries and start being sounds.

Reporting a signal: RST

One last piece of shorthand, because it is what you will actually exchange in a contact. The RST system reports Readability, Signal strength and Tone. Readability runs 1 to 5, from unreadable to perfectly readable. Signal strength runs 1 to 9, from faint and barely perceptible to extremely strong. Tone runs 1 to 9, from an extremely rough hissing note to a pure DC note, and describes the quality of a keyed carrier. So “you are five nine” means perfectly readable and extremely strong, and “RST 538” means perfectly readable, a weak signal, and a good note with just a trace of ripple.

Two points the examiner has been known to pick at. Tone applies only to CW — a voice contact gets a two-figure report, RS, not three. And RST readability is not QRK: they measure a similar thing on similar-looking five-step scales, but they are different scales with different words, and the syllabus list contains QRK, not RST.