ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about confirming contacts and i honestly dont fully understand the whole system. like i get that QSL cards are the physical paper cards you send in the mail but then there's LoTW which is the ARRL thing and also eQSL which seems like a different website entirely and im just not sure which ones i should be bothering with.

i made maybe 60 or 70 contacts so far mostly on 40m SSB and a few FT8 contacts and i havent confirmed a single one because i dont know where to start. someone at my local club said LoTW is the only one that counts for DXCC but another guy said eQSL is fine for other awards. and then there's people who still mail paper cards through the bureau which seems like it takes forever?

do i need to do all three or can i just pick one. also how hard is it to set up LoTW because i heard something about needing a certificate and it looked kind of complicated when i glanced at the website

yeah the whole thing is a bit of a mess when you first look at it honestly. so the short version is LoTW is the gold standard if you ever want to go for DXCC or a lot of the bigger ARRL awards, eQSL is its own separate thing with its own award system and a lot of people use both. paper cards are kind of optional but some people love them and certain rare DX stations only confirm via bureau so you'll run into that eventually.

the LoTW setup is the annoying part, you basically have to request a certificate from the ARRL and it involves a little back and forth with them verifying your license but once its done its pretty painless. if you're running WSJT-X for FT8 it actually has LoTW upload built right in which is nice. for your SSB contacts you'd be logging them in something like Log4OM or whatever you use and then exporting an ADIF file to upload to LoTW.

i'd say start with LoTW just to get it out of the way, then sign up for eQSL too since its free and easy, and then decide if you want to mess with paper cards later. a lot of us do all three depending on who we're working. some DX expeditions are really good about uploading to LoTW quickly, others take months, it varies a lot.

i was in the same boat when i started and honestly just pick LoTW first and get that sorted. eQSL you can do anytime its like a 5 minute signup. the certificate thing for LoTW sounds scary but i just followed the instructions on the ARRL site and it worked fine, took maybe a week to get the cert back in the mail if i remember right.

one thing nobody told me when i started — a lot of the FT8 guys upload to LoTW pretty regularly so you might already have confirmations waiting for you once you get your account set up. that was a nice surprise for me, logged in the first time and had like 20 something confirmed already.