ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep talking about chasing DX and awards and honestly i dont really understand how all of it fits together. like i know DXCC is about working 100 countries and WAS is the 50 states thing but then theres WAZ which is zones and i thought zones and countries were the same thing? they're clearly not lol

anyway i worked a station in the Canary Islands last week on 20m and i was so pumped but then someone told me i need a confirmed QSL to get credit for it and i wasnt even thinking about that during the contact. does that mean i just lost that one or can i still get it confirmed somehow? i uploaded to LoTW but havent heard back. also does every award have separate confirmations or is there like one system that covers everything

sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out if i should be chasing all three at once or focusing on one first

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for years honestly. so the short version: DXCC, WAS, and WAZ are all separate awards from the ARRL and they track different things but they can overlap — a QSO can count toward more than one award at the same time if it meets the criteria. so that Canary Islands contact could count for DXCC (EA8 is a separate entity) and also for WAZ zone 14 i think, you'd want to double check that.

LoTW is the way to go for confirmations, if the other station uploads their log it'll match automatically and you'll get credit. not every DX station uses it though so sometimes you're waiting a while or you end up sending a paper QSL card. dont give up on that canary islands one, plenty of EA8 ops are active on LoTW. i'd say start with DXCC since it kinda naturally pulls you into chasing DX and the others fill in along the way without a ton of extra effort

yeah i was in the same boat when i started chasing awards. one thing that helped me was just keeping a spreadsheet of every QSO and marking which award it might count for, because once you start getting into it you realize you've already got a bunch of credits you didn't even know about. also for WAZ the zones dont line up with countries at all, europe alone has like several zones depending on where you are so its definitely its own thing to track separately. good luck with the canary islands QSL, EA8 is pretty common so you should be fine