ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get into DXing a bit more seriously, or at least trying to. i keep hearing about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i didnt realize how different they all are until i started actually reading about them. like i thought DXCC was just the one awards program and everything else was under it but apparently theyre totally separate things?

anyway right now i have maybe 40 something confirmed states on Logbook of the World and probably 60 or 70 entities in my log total but i dont know how many are actually confirmed. my question is basically which one of these is worth chasing as a newer ham or does it even matter, do people usually just work everything and let the credits pile up naturally. also is there a good way to check if an entity counts for DXCC that isnt just the ARRL list because that thing is kind of confusing to navigate

yeah the awards thing can be a bit overwhelming at first honestly. the short answer is just work everything you can and let the credits sort themselves out — thats basically what most people do. WAS is probably the most achievable one early on since youre already at 40 states, 10 more and you can submit for that. DXCC is the big one most DXers eventually chase and 100 confirmed entities gets you the basic certificate, but WAZ is kind of underrated, working all 40 CQ zones is genuinely tricky and not everyone bothers with it.

for checking entities the ARRL DXCC entity list on their site is really the definitive source, but yeah its not exactly user friendly. Club Log has a pretty good lookup tool that'll tell you if something counts and it integrates with LoTW confirmations which is nice. honestly at 60-70 entities in your log youre already doing pretty good for 8 months in, just keep working DX and the confirmations will come

so anyway i went through this exact same confusion like two years ago lol. what helped me was just picking one to focus on first and i went with WAS because it felt more reachable. finished it in about a year and it kind of gave me the bug to go after DXCC properly after that. the nice thing is a lot of the contacts you make just naturally count toward multiple awards so you arent really wasting time working one vs the other

one thing i'd say is make sure you get your LoTW account actually set up and active if you havent already because getting confirmations the old way with paper QSLs is slow and expensive and honestly most of the serious DX stations use LoTW now anyway