so ive been licensed about 14 months now and been doing mostly local stuff and some casual HF but a buddy at the club last week was showing me his DXCC certificate and i kind of got the bug. i had no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes honestly.

i started looking at my log and apparently i already have like 34 entities confirmed on LoTW which i didnt even realize counted toward it. so thats a nice surprise. but i have some basic questions that i cant seem to find a straight answer to just from reading the ARRL site which is kind of overwhelming if youre new to this.

first - does WAS and DXCC share any of the same confirmed contacts or are they totally separate things? like if i work all 50 states does that do anything for DXCC or are they just two different award systems with no overlap. second question is about WAZ - the zone thing confuses me a bit, like i get that the world is divided into 40 CQ zones but some entities seem to span multiple zones? is that right or am i misreading the maps.

also is there a good logging program that people use that kinda tracks all this stuff automatically and shows you whats missing. right now im on Log4OM but i dont know if im using it right for this purpose

welcome to the addiction haha. so to answer your first question - WAS and DXCC are completely separate award programs and the contacts dont really overlap in terms of credit. working all 50 states gets you WAS, working 100 confirmed entities gets you DXCC, and WAZ is the 40 zone thing. you can work a station that counts for all three at the same time but theyre tracked independently. so like if you work a station in Wyoming that might be a new state for WAS, its almost certainly in the US entity for DXCC which you already have, and its in CQ zone 3 or 4 depending on where in Wyoming they are. make sense?

on your WAZ question yeah you are reading it right, some countries or entities do span more than one zone. Canada is a big example - a station in Ontario is zone 4 but someone up in the Yukon or Northwest Territories is zone 1. so you gotta pay attention to where exactly the station is operating from, not just what their callsign prefix is. most dx stations will announce their zone in their QRZ listing or on their spots.

for logging i use DXKeeper which is part of the DXLab suite and it tracks all of this really well, shows you your DXCC totals by band and mode, WAZ status, all of it. theres a learning curve but once you get it set up its pretty great. Log4OM is also supposed to handle this but ive never used it myself

34 entities already and you didnt even know you were chasing it - thats honestly how most people start lol. i was the same way, looked at my log one day and realized i was halfway to 100 without really trying.

one thing i'd add is dont sleep on LoTW confirmations from contacts you made a while back. sometimes people upload logs months or even years later and suddenly youve got new confirmations sitting there. worth checking in every so often even on old contacts. also club log is worth setting up if you havent already, a lot of dx expeditions use it for their online log checking and OQRS which is how you request QSL cards from them directly.

the card vs LoTW thing is its own whole discussion but for chasing DXCC credits most people do a mix of both now