Signal Strength

Or, "Rubber Ducky, you're five by five."

The standard RST or Readability, Signal and Tone system is a scale of 1 to 5 for readability, 1 to 9 for Signal strength, and 1 to 9 for tone, if you're operating with Morse code. There are apparently variations for digital modes, but I'll ignore those for now. The basic idea is that the person you're communicating with tells you how good and strong your signal is, which will give you a clue on whether you can reduce your power, whether you should increase your power, and how clearly and slowly you should communicate, among other things.

The confusion to a new ham is on how exactly to give the S part of the report.

Quantitative Quandary

Most transceivers have an "S-meter" that measures signal strength in S-units from 1 to 9 (and overage in decibels.) These can be calibrated to correspond to some amounts of microvolts. What the meter says, though, may not correspond to the subjective experience; the S-meter may be at 5, and the signal is great. Then what? Do you give them what your meter says, or what you think it sounds like? Even worse, when running less-than-desirable antennas, you may never see the S-meter pop above 4 or so. Do you give a "relative" report, or tell everyone that their signal sucks, when in fact it's you're antenna that's the limiting factor.

Relatively Absolutely

A very basic aspect that also seems to be entirely unclear is whether to give the absolute level of the signal (when reading it off the meter) or the signal above the noise level. Again, running sub-par antennas out of an apartment my noise level is hideous, quite often a solid S3 or so on my meter. When a station registers at S4 on my meter, should I tell them 1 for signal strength, or 4?

So far, I haven't been able to find real consensus on the issues, though it appears that the best bet is to use judgment and give relative, subjective reports.