ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still dont fully understand the whole QSL confirmation thing. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone, you send a card or whatever to confirm it. but then theres LoTW and eQSL and paper cards and everyone seems to have a different opinion on which one matters.

i signed up for LoTW a few months back and uploaded some logs but honestly i have no idea if anyone is matching with me because the interface is kind of confusing. and eQSL i made an account but i havent really used it. then i actually got a real paper QSL card in the mail last week from a station in Japan which was super cool but i dont know what to do with it exactly, like do i need to do anything to confirm back?

so basically my questions are — does LoTW count for DXCC and awards and stuff? does eQSL count for anything official? and when someone sends you a paper card should you always send one back? sorry if this is a dumb question i just see a lot of people talking about QSL managers and bureaus and i feel like im missing something

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for years honestly. ok so the short version: LoTW is run by the ARRL and is what you need for DXCC credit, that's probably the most important thing to know. when two stations both upload their logs and the contact matches up on date, time, band and mode it becomes a confirmed QSL in LoTW. so yes upload your logs and eventually contacts will start confirming, sometimes it takes a while because the other station has to upload too.

eQSL is a separate system and it's not accepted for DXCC but some other awards do accept it, like the Worked All States on eQSL has its own award program. some operators are really active on eQSL and some ignore it completely. i use both just to cover my bases.

as for the paper card from Japan — yes you should absolutely send one back if you can. that's just good operating courtesy. you can order cards pretty cheap from a bunch of places, vista print works fine, some guys get fancy ones made. you can send it directly to their callsign via your national QSL bureau which is cheaper than direct mail, or just send it directly with a self addressed envelope and a couple dollars to cover return postage if you want a card back from them too. the bureau is slower but free basically. welcome to the rabbit hole, it only gets more complicated from here haha

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. one thing that tripped me up early on was making sure the time in your log is UTC and matches exactly, like even being off by a minute can cause a non-match. took me a while to figure out why some of my contacts weren't confirming.

also if you work a lot of DX stations some of them use QSL managers, meaning you dont send the card to the actual callsign you worked, you send it to a third person who handles all their cards. you can look up who manages a callsign on qrz.com usually it says right on their page. kind of a weird system but it works