so I've had my general ticket for about two years now and I've been making contacts here and there but never really with any purpose I guess. A buddy of mine at the club just got his DXCC plaque in the mail and now I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of chasing it myself. Problem is I don't really know where to start with the whole award credit system. Like I get that it's 100 entities confirmed but the LoTW stuff confuses me and I don't know if my old paper QSLs count or how to even submit anything.

I also saw there's WAS and WAZ and a bunch of other awards and now I feel like I should be chasing all of them at once but that seems like it would spread me too thin? Do most people focus on one first or just work everything and sort it out later. I'm running an IC-7300 into a dipole in the attic so my signal isn't exactly thundering out there but I have managed to work some pretty surprising DX on 17 and 20 meters.

Any advice from people who've done this would be really appreciated, even just knowing where to start would help a ton.

honestly the best thing I ever did was just start logging everything in WSJT-X or whatever you're using and make sure LoTW upload is turned on automatically. the credits just kind of accumulate on their own after a while and one day you look up and you've got 60-something entities confirmed without really trying that hard. the paper QSL thing is a bit more of a hassle but yes they do count, you'd submit them through the ARRL card checker at a hamfest or mail them in, there's info on the ARRL site about it.

as for chasing multiple awards at once -- yeah just work everything and sort it later, thats what most people do. WAS kind of takes care of itself if you're doing any contesting at all since US stations are everywhere. WAZ takes a bit more deliberate effort depending on which zones are hard for you geographically. DXCC is the one most people get obsessed with though and honestly it earns it, theres nothing quite like finally snagging that one entity you've been waiting on for months.

attic dipole on an IC-7300 is more than enough to get started, FT8 will get you a long way on the entity count even if you want to eventually chase phone or CW credits too.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually so take this with a grain of salt but what helped me was just picking DXCC as the main goal and treating the others as bonuses. like when I work a state I note it but im not stressing about WAS specifically. one thing I will say is get your LoTW account set up properly before anything else because its kind of a pain if you have a backlog of contacts to upload later. I had like 8 months of logs to go through and it was tedious getting it all sorted out.