so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep talking about DXCC and chasing entities and i kinda get the concept but im honestly confused about the actual process of getting credits confirmed. like i made a contact with a station in the Canary Islands last week and someone in my club said that counts as a separate entity from Spain but i wasnt sure if i needed to do anything special or if logging it in LOTW automatically means it counts toward something

also i saw there's WAS and WAZ too and i dont really understand how those are different goals or if you're supposed to chase all of them at the same time or what. i've worked maybe 40 or 50 countries at this point just messing around on 20m mostly and someone told me i should be keeping better track but i don't really know what that means practically speaking. any help appreciated, and yes i did google it but the ARRL pages are kind of dense

yeah the Canary Islands (EA8) is definitely a separate DXCC entity from mainland Spain, so that contact counts as its own entity credit. good catch on your part. the basic idea with DXCC is you need confirmed contacts with 100 different entities to get the basic award, and LOTW is the easiest way to get those confirmations — if the other station is also uploading to LOTW and your logs match up, it just confirms automatically and you can see it in your account. you don't need to do anything special during the contact itself.

WAS is totally separate — that's Worked All States, so 50 US states confirmed. WAZ is Worked All Zones, which is 40 CQ zones worldwide. they're independent awards, you apply for them separately through ARRL or CQ magazine depending on which one. most people do end up chasing more than one at a time just because a lot of DX contacts help with WAZ and DXCC simultaneously. honestly the best thing you can do right now is just make sure every contact goes into LOTW. even your old ones if you have the logs — you can upload them and some of them might already be confirmed waiting for you.

im in almost the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started actually paying attention to this stuff a few months ago. one thing that helped me was downloading the DXCC entity list and just keeping it open while i operate so i can cross check. also there's a website called Club Log that's really useful, you can upload your ADIF log and it tells you what entities you've worked and which ones are confirmed vs just worked. saved me a lot of confusion honestly. the 40 or 50 countries you've already worked might be more entities than you think once you start sorting it out properly