ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and im still kind of confused about the whole QSL confirmation thing. like i understand the basic concept — you made a contact, you confirm it both ways, great. but theres so many ways to do it now and i cant figure out which ones actually matter for awards and which ones are just kind of... optional i guess?

right now i have an account on eQSL and ive been logging contacts there but someone at my local club told me that ARRL awards like DXCC only accept LoTW or paper cards sent through the buro. so ive been doing it wrong this whole time? ive got like 200 contacts in eQSL and none in LoTW. also the LoTW setup process looks really intimidating with the certificates and all that. is it actually as complicated as it looks or am i overthinking it

also do people still actually send paper cards through the bureau? i sent a few direct to some DX stations and never heard back so im not sure if thats even worth it anymore

yeah the LoTW setup looks scary but honestly once you get through it its pretty painless. the hardest part is just getting your certificate from ARRL — you send them a postcard with your callsign and they mail you back an address confirmation, then you download TQSL and set everything up. took me maybe an hour total spread over a couple evenings. after that uploading logs is just a few clicks.

your eQSL contacts arent wasted though — eQSL is accepted for a bunch of other awards, just not DXCC or WAS through ARRL. some CQ awards accept it i believe. and some people genuinely prefer it over LoTW, especially outside north america where a lot of operators have been on eQSL for years.

paper cards through the buro are slow — like sometimes really slow, months or even over a year — but they still come. i got a card last spring from a contact i made in 2021. for rare DX direct is better but even then some stations are just not great at responding, dont take it personally. if you want confirmations that actually rack up for DXCC just focus on getting LoTW set up and start uploading your logs back to the beginning of your license, most logging software can export an ADIF and you just upload the whole thing at once.

so anyway i was in the same boat when i started and what finally made it click for me was just thinking of them as three totally separate systems that happen to overlap. LoTW is the one that "counts" for the big ARRL stuff, eQSL is its own thing with its own awards community, and paper cards are kind of... the original and still meaningful to a lot of people even if they dont count anywhere official unless you mail them to the ARRL desk with your application.

dont stress too much about the 200 contacts in eQSL. once you get LoTW going you can upload your whole log history and a bunch of those same stations will probably already be in there and your confirmations will just appear. happened to me, it was kind of satisfying actually seeing all those confirmations pop up at once.