so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been slowly figuring out the whole QSL confirmation thing and honestly its more complicated than i expected. like i knew paper cards were a thing but then everyone kept mentioning LoTW and i set that up last month and now people are also talking about eQSL and i just dont know if i need all of them or if one is better than the other or what

right now i send paper cards through the bureau for anyone who seems interested and ive uploaded a few logs to LoTW but i havent done anything with eQSL yet. is eQSL even worth bothering with? i see some people have the authenticated member thing and some dont and im not sure what that means for the confirmations counting toward awards or whatever

also kind of a separate thing — when i get a paper card in the mail i genuinely get excited in a way that a digital confirmation just doesnt give me. is that weird or does everyone feel that way haha

not weird at all about the paper cards, i still get a little kick out of pulling them out of the bureau envelope even after 20 years. theres something about holding a card from like a remote island somewhere that just feels different.

anyway to actually answer your question — you dont NEED all three but theres reasons to have them. LoTW is run by the ARRL and is what counts for DXCC and a lot of the major awards, so thats the one id prioritize. eQSL is more of a community thing, some people love it, some ignore it entirely. the authenticated member status on eQSL is what makes contacts count toward certain awards through their own system, but its not the same as LoTW for ARRL awards.

honestly my advice is keep doing what you're doing with LoTW and the bureau, and only bother with eQSL if you find yourself wanting to chase their specific awards or if you run into a lot of operators who only confirm that way. some dx stations upload to all three just to cover everyone, others only do one. its kind of the wild west still.

im in basically the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and had the exact same confusion. what finally made it click for me was thinking of them as just different systems that different people use and none of them really talk to each other.

i do all three now just because i want to make sure im confirming contacts with whoever wants to confirm them. paper through the bureau is slow but some older ops really only do paper and its kind of nice to respect that. took me forever to figure out the bureau system though, that was its own whole learning curve lol