ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people on the air talking about their DXCC count or that they need a certain entity for some award and honestly im still trying to sort out how all these different awards relate to each other. like i understand DXCC is 100 countries (well entities i know i know) but then there's WAS which is all 50 states and WAZ is the zones thing and some guys are working on all three at the same time apparently.

my question is really just... where do most people start? i've been logging contacts in WSJT-X and most of my FT8 stuff has been domestic so i probably have a decent start on WAS without even realizing it. but i dont know if i should be focused on one at a time or just work everything and let the credits pile up. also does LoTW confirmations count for all of them or is it different per award? i uploaded my log last week and have like 40 something confirmations already which felt exciting but i have no idea if those are counting toward anything specific

honestly the best thing about all three of those awards is that your contacts count toward whichever ones apply — you dont have to chase them separately if that makes sense. like if you work W5RRR in Texas on 20m and he confirms on LoTW, that contact can count toward WAS (Texas), DXCC (USA entity, though that only helps if you're working toward mixed or phone or whatever), and WAZ for whatever zone Texas falls in. so just keep working everything and let the log sort it out later.

40 LoTW confirmations in 8 months on FT8 is a solid start. i'd actually recommend downloading the DXCC country list from the ARRL site and just looking at it once in a while — youll start to recognize which prefixes are which entities and it becomes kind of addictive honestly. WAZ is 40 zones total and some of them are genuinely hard to get, zone 2 up in the arctic being the obvious one. start with DXCC and WAS since those have the clearest paths forward for someone on HF and the mixed mode submissions make it accessible without needing a specific antenna setup or anything crazy

same boat as you were like a year ago so maybe my experience helps. i just worked everything that looked interesting on FT8 and PSK reporter and after about 6 months i checked my LoTW totals and realized i was already at like 67 entities without trying. that was when i caught the bug bad lol. WAS took me longer actually because some states just dont show up that much on FT8 — ND and MT were my last two and i had to actually go looking for them on the DX clusters instead of just calling CQ.

one thing i wish someone told me earlier is to submit for the WAS award as soon as you hit 50 confirmed because theres something about actually having the certificate that makes the whole thing feel real and keeps you motivated for the next goal