so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some casual HF but lately ive been getting really into trying to work DX and someone at my club mentioned i should look into DXCC. i pulled up the ARRL page and honestly its a little overwhelming at first glance. like theres the basic DXCC, then theres mixed, phone, digital, band-specific ones... i didnt realize there were so many different ways to pursue it.

i guess my main question is do most people just start by logging whatever they can work and then apply later, or is there some strategy to it? also i noticed something about needing actual paper QSL cards vs LoTW confirmations and im a little fuzzy on how that works now. does everyone use LoTW these days or do you still need to paper QSL for certain entities. my logging software is Log4OM if that matters.

also while im asking — is WAS worth chasing alongside DXCC or is that kind of a separate rabbit hole. someone told me WAZ is harder than DXCC which surprised me honestly.

Welcome to the rabbit hole, fair warning you may never come out haha. Okay so honestly the easiest thing to do is just start working whatever DX you can hear and make sure youre uploading to LoTW regularly. The vast majority of serious DX operators use LoTW now so your confirmations will stack up faster than you'd expect. Paper QSLs are still needed for a handful of entities where the operator just doesnt do LoTW, but its getting rarer. Some of the really rare DXpedition guys will actually do LoTW within a few months of the operation now which is great.

For strategy — early on i'd say dont overthink it. The first 100 entities come pretty easy if youre on 20 and 17 meters and paying attention to the DX clusters. Its when you start getting into the 200s and above that you really have to start planning and waiting for activations of rare entities. WAS is totally worth doing at the same time, i worked most of my states just incidentally while chasing DX. WAZ is... yeah its harder than people expect because some of those zones are just rarely activated or the propagation to get there is tricky. Zone 2 and a few of the pacific zones gave me fits.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at DXCC for about a year now and just hit 187 confirmed on LoTW which feels pretty good. one thing i wish someone told me earlier is to not sleep on the digital modes, FT8 especially. i know some purists grumble about it but for filling in entities that are tough on SSB its honestly been a lifesaver. a lot of operators running low power from rare places can still make it into the log on FT8 when they'd never be loud enough for a phone pile up.

Log4OM should work fine with LoTW, i use WSJT-X and it syncs up okay. just make sure your station location is set right in your LoTW account or your credits wont match up, learned that the hard way when i had a couple dozen QSOs that didnt confirm because of a callsign/location mismatch thing.