ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i finally started logging seriously and someone mentioned i should be uploading to LoTW but then someone else at the club said eQSL is just as good and now i dont really know what im doing. like i have a stack of paper QSL cards that came in the mail from contacts i made on 40m and 20m and they're really cool to look at honestly, but do those count for anything award-wise or is it all digital now?

also the LoTW setup was kind of a pain, i had to get a certificate from the ARRL and there was a whole thing with tqsl and i kept getting errors. i think i got it working but im not totally sure my logs are actually uploading correctly. is there a way to check if a contact confirmed on there?

basically i guess my question is do i need to be doing all three of these things or can i just pick one and stick with it. and are paper cards still worth sending out or is that kind of old fashioned at this point

so the short answer is they all count for different things and yeah its kind of confusing at first. LoTW is what the ARRL uses for DXCC and a lot of the big awards so if you care about working toward those thats the one you really want to get sorted. eQSL has its own awards and some people like it but its not accepted for DXCC which matters if you ever get serious about chasing entities.

paper cards are still absolutely worth it in my opinion, i know some people think its old fashioned but getting a nice card from somewhere like japan or south america in the mailbox never gets old. plus for awards like WAS through traditional channels the paper cards work fine. some of the older ops especially DX stations really appreciate when you send a physical card, and a lot of them still send beautiful ones back.

for checking if a contact confirmed on LoTW you just log in to the website and look at your logbook there, confirmed ones show up differently than just uploaded ones. if your tqsl is uploading right you should see your QSOs appearing. took me a while to figure that part out too honestly.

yeah i was in the same boat a few months ago, the tqsl certificate process is genuinely annoying and i redid mine twice before it clicked. one thing i'll say is make sure your station callsign in tqsl matches exactly what you're logging under, i had an issue where i had my callsign set up wrong and contacts were uploading but not matching anything.

i do all three personally, upload to LoTW after every session, throw things on eQSL too because it takes like two seconds once you have it set up, and i still send paper cards to anyone who sends me one or if i work somewhere really interesting. its a little extra effort but thats kind of part of the hobby for me