okay so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DX and getting awards and i finally started looking into it properly this week. DXCC, WAS, WAZ — theres so many of them and i honestly dont fully understand how they work or which one makes sense to go after first as a general class op with a pretty basic station (IC-7300, end-fed halfwave in the backyard).

from what i can tell DXCC is like the big one where you need contacts with 100 different countries or entities or whatever they call them, and WAS is all 50 states which honestly sounds more doable for me right now. WAZ i looked up and its the 40 CQ zones which seems like it could overlap with the other two a lot. do the contacts count for multiple awards or do you have to make separate QSOs for each program? and is Logbook of the World the only way to submit these days or can you still mail QSL cards?

sorry if this is a really basic question, i just dont want to start logging contacts randomly without understanding what actually counts toward what

totally get the confusion, i was in the same spot a couple years ago. the good news is yes, the same QSO can count toward multiple awards — so if you work a station in Wyoming on 20m that logs it on LoTW, that contact can count for WAS, DXCC (if it's a valid entity which Wyoming obviously is as part of US), and WAZ for whatever zone Wyoming is in. you dont have to do anything special, just make sure both sides confirm on LoTW and the credits stack up automatically in your account.

honestly for your setup i'd start with WAS just because chasing states is a lot more forgiving when you dont have a huge antenna farm. you can work a ton of states on 40m and 20m without needing to squeeze every last dB out of your setup. DXCC is great fun but some of those rarer entities need you to be there at the right time with decent signal, so having some experience under your belt helps. WAZ kind of comes along for the ride once you're doing the other two.

LoTW is definitely the way to go these days, paper cards still work but processing time is forever and you have to pay for each credit confirmation with ARRL. get your LoTW account set up if you havent already and just start logging everything, you'll be surprised how fast the credits add up

yeah what he said about LoTW is spot on. one thing i'll add — dont sleep on 40m for WAS especially in the evenings, the continental states come in really well and even with an end-fed you should be able to work most of them without too much hassle. Alaska and Hawaii are the ones people always get stuck on for WAS, just gotta be patient and check the DX clusters when there's activity.

also just a heads up the ARRL DXCC list and the entity count has some quirks — like some places you'd think are the same country count as separate entities for historical reasons. it gets kinda nerdy but in a good way once you start getting into it