so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some contests here and there but lately ive really gotten into chasing DX and someone at the club mentioned i should start tracking my QSOs toward DXCC and i kind of nodded along like i knew what they meant but honestly im still fuzzy on how it all works

like i understand the basic concept, 100 confirmed entities and you get the basic award, but what i dont get is the difference between worked and confirmed. does a QSO in my log count toward anything until i get it confirmed through LoTW or a card? and if i already have like 80 something entities logged from the past couple years do those count or do i have to have started tracking from some specific date

also someone mentioned WAS and WAZ and i sort of want to chase all of them eventually but should i just focus on DXCC first or is there a smart order to go after these things. any advice from people who have done this would be great, im running a modest station, just a tribander at about 35 feet so nothing crazy

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. ok so worked vs confirmed — worked just means it's in your log, confirmed means the other station has uploaded to LoTW and there's a match, or you've exchanged paper QSLs and submitted them. only confirmed QSOs count for the actual award credit, but the ARRL lets you apply once you hit 100 confirmed so the worked number is really just your pipeline of hope

the good news is your old QSOs absolutely count as long as you can get them confirmed. a lot of guys dont realize this and think they have to start fresh. dig through your old logs, get them uploaded to LoTW if they arent already, and chase confirmations on the ones that matter. some of those DX stations from years ago may already be in LoTW and you just have to sync your account

as for order of operations, i'd say focus on DXCC first since it's the big one and your tribander will work fine for most of it. WAS kind of happens naturally along the way if you're on HF regularly, and WAZ is a nice project for when you're feeling like the DX is getting repetitive. they all use LoTW so it's not like you're doing double work anyway

yeah what he said about old QSOs is right, i spent like two weeks going back through paper logs from my first couple years and getting everything entered and it turned out i already had way more entities worked than i thought. the hard part is getting the other side to confirm, especially for some of the more rare ones where the operator might not be active anymore or doesnt use LoTW

one thing nobody told me when i started — paper QSL cards still count if you submit them to the ARRL card checker, so dont ignore that route for entities where LoTW matching just isnt happening. took me forever to figure that out