so ive been licensed about 3 years now mostly just ragchewing on 40m and doing some local nets but lately ive been getting pulled into DX chasing and honestly its kind of addictive. i worked a station in Japan last week on 20m and that feeling of getting the QSL back is something else.

anyway i want to start actually going for DXCC but im a little confused about the whole process. like i understand you need 100 confirmed entities but im not sure if i should be using LoTW from the start or paper QSLs or what. also how does WAS and WAZ factor in, are those totally separate awards you apply for independently or do some of the confirmations overlap somehow. i dont want to do a bunch of work and find out i was doing it wrong the whole time.

also someone mentioned mixed vs phone vs digital modes for DXCC — do most people go for mixed first and then try the mode specific ones later or is there some better strategy. sorry if this is a dumb question im just trying to figure out the best path forward without wasting a lot of effort

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere with this stuff. first thing i'd say is yes get on LoTW immediately if you're not already, a huge percentage of serious DX operators upload there and confirmed credits just accumulate in the background without you having to chase paper cards. you can still collect paper QSLs for the fun of it but for actually submitting toward DXCC credit LoTW is the way most people go these days.

WAS and WAZ are completely separate awards run by different organizations actually — WAS is ARRL same as DXCC but WAZ is CQ magazine. the confirmations themselves dont overlap in terms of the applications but the actual contacts can count toward multiple awards, like if you work all 50 states those QSOs can go toward WAS and if those states happen to cover different zones those same contacts count toward WAZ progress too. you're not doing duplicate work.

on the mixed vs mode question — yeah almost everyone goes for mixed first because it lets you use whatever mode gets you the contact. once you hit 100 on mixed a lot of people start a phone only or digital only run just because the challenge changes. i did mixed first then spent about two years filling in phone separately and honestly the second run was more fun because i already knew which entities were going to be the hard ones.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been chasing DXCC for about a year now and just hit 98 confirmed last month so close it hurts haha. one thing nobody told me early on is to keep really good logs from day one because trying to go back and figure out which QSOs were on which band or mode is a pain. i use WSJT-X for FT8 and it logs automatically which helps a lot.

also the ClubLog website is worth looking at, you can upload your log and it shows you a map of which entities you've worked and confirmed and which ones you're still missing. makes it pretty obvious where to focus your antenna when a rare one shows up on the DX cluster.