okay so ive been chasing DX pretty casually for about two years now and i think i have somewhere around 140 entities confirmed but honestly i dont fully understand how the whole credit system works anymore. back when i started everyone said you need the QSL card but now people keep telling me LoTW is the way to go and the paper cards dont really matter as much?

heres my actual confusion though — i have a bunch of contacts in LoTW that are confirmed, and i have a bunch of paper cards, but some entities i only have one or the other. like i worked a rare one from the south pacific last year and the op uploaded to LoTW but never replied to my card request. does that LoTW confirmation count toward my DXCC credit even without a paper card? i genuinely cant find a straight answer on the ARRL site and reading the rules makes my head spin a bit.

also while im asking — WAS and WAZ, are those tracked the same way or does each award have totally different confirmation requirements? i work a lot of phone so im on HF most evenings. just trying to figure out if im wasting time sending paper cards when LoTW does the same job basically.

LoTW confirmations absolutely count for DXCC, thats been the case for years now and honestly most serious DXers have moved almost entirely to LoTW. if both you and the other station uploaded the contact and it matched, thats a valid confirmation for credit purposes — no paper card needed. the ARRL actually prefers LoTW submissions now when you apply.

for WAS and WAZ it works similarly in that LoTW handles confirmations for those too, but they are separate award programs with their own rules. WAZ is through CQ magazine not ARRL so thats a whole different submission process — you still need to deal with CQ directly and last i checked they accept LoTW confirmations but you have to request the credits through their system specifically. WAZ also has different zone requirements obviously so dont mix up your entity counts with zone counts, ive seen newer guys get confused about that.

short answer: stop sending paper cards to stations who upload to LoTW, youre wasting stamps. save the paper card hustle for stations that dont use LoTW at all, which is still a fair number of DX ops unfortunately.

yeah same thing tripped me up when i was going for my first DXCC. i had like 120 confirmed on paper and then realized half of them werent uploaded anywhere and i had to actually mail in a whole stack of cards to the checkpoint. kind of a pain honestly. now i just check LoTW first before i even bother with a card request, saves a lot of time and postage money adds up fast when youre sending stuff overseas.

one thing i'll add — if you're close to hitting a threshold like 100 or 200 for an endorsement, sometimes its worth double checking your LoTW account to see whats actually matched vs just uploaded. i thought i had something confirmed once and it turned out the other guy's log had a slightly different time and it didnt match. easy fix but you gotta catch it.