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downtime null · August 24th 18, 04:36 AM posted to rec.radio.scanner

wrote:
On Friday, January 31, 1997 at 4:00:00 PM UTC+8, D.S. Fenstermacher wrote:
Lately I have been hearing the local police respond with the term QSL. It
appears that the response is just another way of answering in the
affirmative. But what does it mean?

Scott

QSL? and QSL originate from CW (morse code) and basically mean either "are you listening", "I am listening" or "I heard". It really has no place on ham, police or any other radio, but I suppose people appropriated it to sound more cool.

My guess as to why the letters were selected is that they form a distinct pattern of short and long beeps that makes it easy to distinguish when a message ends or begins - my basis for this is the year I spent in the army listening to morse code and that even 20 years later, the sound of "QSL" morsed out is engrained into my brain even better than the 3 short, 2 long 3 short that Nokie phones used to beep out when you got an SMS message (3 short is an "S", 2 long is an "M" in morse)

My understanding is that it is basically the same as "roger" which means
"I hear you and understand". Although it may be more like "copy" which
just means that "I hear you". QSL and the long list of Q codes are mostly
used in CW communication on the amateur bands.