ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 20m when the band cooperates. started getting into chasing awards and suddenly everyone is talking about LoTW and eQSL and paper cards and im just... lost about what actually counts for what.

right now i upload to LoTW through TQSL and i think thats working because i see confirmations showing up but honestly i set it up by following a youtube video and i dont fully understand what im doing. i signed up for eQSL too but i have no idea if my logs are actually syncing or if i need to do something manually. and then theres paper cards — i got a few in the mail from some dx stations which was super cool but do i need to send cards back to all of them? feels like a lot of postage.

mainly asking because i want to eventually go for DXCC and i saw that only LoTW and physical cards via the buro or direct count for that. so does eQSL even matter? should i bother keeping up with it or is it kind of a separate thing for different awards?

yeah you've basically got it right already — LoTW is the one that counts for DXCC and most of the ARRL awards, eQSL is kind of its own ecosystem with the Worked All Europe award and stuff like that. they dont talk to each other at all which is annoying.

i still upload to both just out of habit and because some ops only use one or the other. takes maybe an extra two minutes with ADIF master or just exporting from whatever logging software you use. for paper cards, no you dont have to send one back to everyone who sends you one but its considered good form especially for dx. a lot of people use the buro to keep costs down — you basically send a batch to your national society and they route them out. its slow though, like months sometimes. direct mail is faster but yeah the postage adds up fast especially internationally.

for DXCC specifically just focus on LoTW and make sure your callsign certificate in TQSL matches the dates and bands you're actually operating on, that trips a lot of people up early on.

same boat as you about 6 months ago haha. what helped me was just picking one thing at a time — get LoTW solid first since thats what actually moves the needle for awards, then mess with eQSL later if you feel like it. i honestly mostly use eQSL just to see the card artwork people make which sounds dumb but some of them are really cool.

one thing nobody told me — make sure your QRZ page has your eQSL address listed if you sign up, otherwise people cant look you up to send confirmations. took me forever to figure out why my inbox was empty lol