ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and im starting to get into chasing awards and confirming contacts and honestly the whole QSL system is kind of overwhelming me. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone and you both confirm it. simple enough. but then theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing, and eQSL which is a completely different site, and then actual physical cards which i guess people still mail? and some awards only accept certain ones?

i signed up for LoTW a while back but the whole certificate process with tqsl was honestly confusing and i wasnt sure if i did it right. i have uploaded a few logs but i dont know if any of them actually matched with the other station. is there somewhere you can see your confirmed count or does it just show up when you apply for an award

also is eQSL worth bothering with separately or do most serious dx chasers just use LoTW. i dont want to maintain like three different things if i can help it. and are people still actually mailing paper cards in 2024 or is that mostly just a nostalgia thing at this point

yeah the tqsl setup tripped me up too when i first started, it's not exactly intuitive. once you get your certificate loaded and your callsign set up properly it actually works pretty smoothly though. to see your confirmed contacts you log into the LoTW website and under your account there should be a QSL section that shows your uploaded QSOs and which ones have matched. the matched ones show up differently from the unconfirmed ones. you'll start seeing confirmations trickle in as other stations upload their logs, some people batch upload once a week or once a month so dont expect instant results.

as for whether to bother with eQSL — honestly i use both. LoTW is pretty much the gold standard for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, most serious stations are on there. but eQSL has a pretty big user base especially in europe and some parts of asia, and theres people who only use that one. they have their own awards too. it's free so theres no real downside to having an account on both and uploading to both, WSJT-X can actually auto upload to LoTW and some logging programs handle both.

paper cards — i still send and receive them and i genuinely enjoy it. got a nice little pile going. but for award credit purposes, electronic is just way easier and most awards accept LoTW confirmations now. some rare DX peditions still do cards only for certain things but that's becoming less common.

i was in the same boat about six months ago lol. what finally clicked for me was realizing LoTW and eQSL are totally separate systems with no connection to each other, so yeah you kind of do have to maintain both if you want the coverage. i use Log4OM and it can upload to both at the same time which helps a lot.

the confirmed count thing — once matches happen on LoTW they show up in your account and when you eventually go to apply for something like WAS or DXCC it pulls from that. so the confirmations are just sitting there waiting for you to use them basically. i was surprised how many i had built up without realizing it.