ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing different things about how to confirm contacts. my elmer told me to sign up for LoTW which i did but then someone in a pileup mentioned eQSL and now i see people mailing actual paper cards and i genuinely dont know what the expectation is here. like is there some kind of standard or do you just pick one and go with it?

i uploaded my adif from WSJT-X to LoTW and i think it worked but honestly not sure if i did it right because i have like 200 qsos in there and only 12 show as confirmed. is that normal or did i mess something up in the setup. the tqsl thing was confusing to set up and i wasnt sure which station location to use so i just guessed

also what do people actually DO with paper qsl cards these days, like do you need them for any awards or is that just kind of a tradition thing at this point

yeah the 12 out of 200 thing is totally normal, dont panic. LoTW only shows confirmed when the OTHER station has also uploaded their log and your qso details match up — date, time, band, mode, callsign all have to line up within a certain tolerance. a lot of people take weeks or months to upload, some never do. i've got contacts from years ago that suddenly confirmed because someone finally got around to uploading their log.

as for which system to use, honestly most active hams use at least LoTW and eQSL, and some still do paper too. they're kind of for different things. LoTW is what the ARRL uses for DXCC and WAS and stuff like that so if you ever want to chase those awards you'll need it. eQSL is more casual, it's not accepted for ARRL awards but some other awards programs use it and a lot of people just like getting the little graphic cards. paper cards are absolutely still a thing especially for rare DX — some guys will go out of their way to send a bureau card if they worked something special.

for the tqsl setup, make sure your station location has the right grid square and that the callsign on the location matches what you were actually operating under. that trips up a lot of people early on

paper cards are definitely still a thing, i got one last week from a station in Reunion Island and honestly it just felt cool to hold it. went straight into my binder. i get that its old fashioned but there's something about it that LoTW just cant replicate

that said for actually tracking confirmations i do everything digitally now, lotw for the serious award chasing and eqsl kind of just runs in the background. i check it maybe once a month