ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im starting to get a little lost on what the differences even are and which one makes more sense to work toward first as a general class with a modest station

like i understand DXCC is working 100 countries confirmed, and WAS is all 50 states, but WAZ i had to actually look up and its working all 40 CQ zones which i didnt even know was a thing until last week lol

my setup is nothing special, 100 watts into a dipole up about 30 feet, so im not exactly a powerhouse but ive been logging contacts and i think ive got maybe 18 states confirmed through LoTW so far and maybe 30-something DXCC entities but i havent been super careful about tracking it all

someone at my local club said WAS is the easiest to start with because its more predictable when propagation cooperates but another guy said just work everything and let the awards sort themselves out which i guess makes sense but i also like having a goal to work toward you know

anyway just curious what you all think, is there a logical order to these or does it really not matter

honest answer? just work everything you can hear and upload to LoTW regularly and all three will start filling in on their own without you stressing about it too much

that said if i had to pick a starting point for someone with your setup WAS is probably the most achievable in a reasonable timeframe because working stateside is way more forgiving propagation wise and you dont need to stay up until 2am hunting a rare pacific island or whatever

DXCC starts getting addictive fast though, once you hit 100 confirmed you'll want 150 and then 200 and before you know it you're researching what bands the T8 or whatever is going to be on. its a trap in the best possible way. just make sure your LoTW account is set up properly and you're logging everything from day one because there's nothing worse than realizing you worked a rare entity six months ago and didn't log it right

WAZ kind of snuck up on me, i wasnt really paying attention to zones at all for like my first two years and then someone mentioned it and i pulled up my log and realized i was actually way closer than i thought. some zones are really tough though depending on where you are geographically, zone 1 up in northern canada is weirdly hard to catch for me here in the midwest

your dipole setup can absolutely do all three btw dont let anyone tell you otherwise, i worked most of my WAS on 40m with a wire antenna and a tuner