ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im a little lost on which one makes the most sense to go after first. like i understand the basic concept — you work a certain number of entities or states or zones and submit the cards or log data to ARRL or wherever but the whole credit submission thing is confusing me.

do you have to do LoTW for all of them or can you still use paper QSLs? and is there like a natural order people tend to do these in? i'm running 100w into a dipole up about 25 feet in my backyard so im not exactly a pistol station but ive been having fun making contacts. just worked my first JA last week which was pretty exciting. anyway any advice on where to start would be appreciated, dont want to waste a bunch of money submitting for something thats way out of reach yet

WAS is probably the most natural starting point honestly, especially since you're in the US — 50 states is very achievable even with a modest setup and you'll get a feel for how the whole QSL and credit thing works without it costing a fortune. LoTW makes it way easier these days, most stateside ops are on there. once you get comfortable with that then DXCC starts to make sense to chase because you'll have already worked a bunch of entities just by accident while hunting states anyway.

WAZ is fun but 40 zones takes a bit more patience and some of them are genuinely hard to get from certain parts of the country. dont stress too much about the order though — just work what you hear and the awards kind of fill in on their own over time. i didnt really plan any of it and ended up with WAS confirmed in about my first year without even really trying that hard.

yeah what he said about LoTW, get that set up ASAP if you havent already because a lot of the credits you've already made might be sitting there waiting for you. i was surprised when i finally got my account sorted and loaded my logs — had like 30 something DXCC entities confirmed already without even realizing it. paper QSLs still count for all of them but honestly the bureau is slow and LoTW just makes everything cleaner. also 100w and a dipole is totally fine for WAS, ive seen people do it on way less