ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im not even sure i understand the difference between them. like are these run by the same organization or different ones? and do you have to pay for each one separately?

i got my general back in march and ive been doing a lot of HF since then, mostly 20m and 40m, and someone in my club mentioned i might already have enough states worked for WAS without even realizing it. is that how it works, you just log contacts and then apply later? i feel like ive been operating without really tracking anything intentionally which might have been dumb in hindsight.

also the DXCC thing — i know it stands for DX century club so you need 100 countries but are territories counted separately? like does hawaii count as a separate entity from the mainland US? i thought i read something about that but wasnt sure if i was reading it right.

sorry if this is a basic question, just trying to wrap my head around all of it before i start actually trying to chase these things on purpose

not a basic question at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first encounter it. so yeah they're all separate awards with separate requirements and fees, but they're all worth chasing if you enjoy that kind of operating.

WAS is Worked All States, run by ARRL, you need all 50 US states confirmed. WAZ is Worked All Zones, that's the 40 CQ zones worldwide, run by CQ magazine. DXCC is also ARRL and yeah it's 100 confirmed DXCC entities — and entities are not the same as countries, which trips everyone up at first. Hawaii is indeed a separate entity from the continental US, so is Alaska. there's a whole list of like 340 something current entities on the ARRL website worth bookmarking.

the good news is if you've been logging in something like LOTW or even just a paper log, you can go back through your contacts and see what you've got. a lot of people dont realize they're close to WAS until someone points it out. definitely start uploading to Logbook of the World if you haven't, that's how most confirmations happen these days and it makes the award applications way easier.

yeah what he said basically. i'll just add that i was in almost exactly the same spot as you maybe two years ago and the moment i started actually *trying* to work new entities and states it became kind of addictive in a good way. like you start looking at the band with totally different eyes.

one thing worth knowing — for DXCC specifically you can apply for credit online through ARRL if your QSL confirmations are in LOTW, which makes it pretty painless. i think i applied for my first DXCC certificate with like 112 entities confirmed and it was maybe a 10 minute process. the fee wasnt bad either, i want to say it was around 15 bucks for members but dont quote me on that, check the ARRL site for current pricing.

also dont sleep on WAZ, it doesnt get talked about as much but its a really satisfying one to chase because some of those zones are genuinely hard to catch on the air. zone 1 up in the arctic took me forever