okay so i just got my general about two months ago and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m SSB and a little HF digital. someone in my club mentioned i should be uploading to LoTW and i went and created an account but honestly the whole TQSL certificate thing had me spinning for like an hour before i gave up.

then someone else said eQSL is easier and i should do that instead. and then another guy said paper cards are still the way to go if you want the real confirmations for awards. im just trying to figure out what most people actually do and whether i really need to be doing all of them. like does a LoTW confirmation count the same as a paper card for DXCC or whatever? and is eQSL basically useless for the serious stuff?

i dont want to spend a ton of time on this if half of it doesnt matter but i also dont want to miss confirmations from people i worked months ago. any help appreciated, been lurking here a while and everyone seems pretty knowledgeable

The short answer is LoTW is the one that actually matters for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS. eQSL confirmations dont count toward those, at least not officially, though eQSL has its own awards system which some people care about. Paper cards still count for DXCC if you submit them but honestly most serious DXers just do LoTW now because its so much faster and cheaper than mailing cards around the world.

The TQSL setup is annoying the first time, not gonna lie. But once you get your certificate sorted and figure out how to sign your logs before uploading, it basically runs itself. I just log everything in WSJT-X or whatever, export the ADIF, and toss it into TQSL every few weeks. Takes maybe two minutes.

I still send and receive paper cards because i genuinely like them, got a whole wall covered at this point, but i wouldnt rely on paper alone if youre chasing DXCC. Do LoTW first, then if you want eQSL too its easy enough to set up and some DX stations upload there that dont bother with LoTW for whatever reason.

yeah the TQSL thing tripped me up too when i first started, i think i had to watch a youtube video twice before it clicked. the part that confused me was that you have to create a separate callsign certificate for each location if you ever operate portable or from a different address, which nobody really explains upfront.

one thing worth doing is going back and uploading your logs from contacts you already made, you can set the date range in TQSL and it'll handle it. i waited almost six months before i started uploading and still got a bunch of confirmations come through retroactively which was a nice surprise