so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just did local stuff and some casual HF but last month something clicked and i got really into DXing. worked about 40 entities in the last few weeks alone which felt amazing but now im trying to figure out how the actual DXCC program works and i feel like im reading the rules in circles

main thing im confused about is the QSL side of it. like i understand you need confirmations but do i need paper QSLs or is LoTW sufficient for submitting credits? i've been uploading everything to LoTW but wasnt sure if thats enough or if i still need to collect physical cards too. also does every contact need to be on a different band or entity or is it one per entity total regardless of band

also started looking at WAS and WAZ at the same time because why not right. WAZ seems more forgiving zone wise but WAS is brutal if you dont have a decent antenna for some of the rarer states (looking at you Rhode Island and Delaware, never seem to hear anyone from there on 40m)

anyway any advice from folks who've gone through this would be great, feel like im drinking from a firehose right now

LoTW is absolutely fine for DXCC, thats actually the preferred method these days and ARRL accepts it directly. you log into the awards system and it just shows your confirmed entities automatically as they match up. you dont need paper cards unless you want them for other reasons or if a particular station only does paper QSL. the nice thing is a lot of DX stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly now especially after big DXpeditions

for DXCC basic it's 100 entities confirmed, and each entity counts once regardless of band for the mixed award. but if you want DXCC on specific bands like 80m or 17m, those are separate endorsements and you need 100 confirmed on that band specifically. so working the same entity on 5 bands gets you credit toward 5 different band endorsements but only counts once for mixed. took me a while to wrap my head around that too

Rhode Island on 40 - honestly just takes patience, i worked W1AW/3 during the portable operations a while back and that knocked out a bunch of states. keep an ear on the clusters

yeah WAS tripped me up too when i was starting out, Delaware was my last state and it sat unconfirmed for like 8 months because the guy never uploaded to LoTW and i kept forgetting to send a card. eventually found him on QRZ and just emailed him directly asking if he could upload lol, he was super cool about it

one thing nobody told me early on -- keep a spreadsheet or use something like DX4WIN or even just a notes file tracking what you've worked vs what you've confirmed. thats where people get frustrated, they think they have something wrapped up and then realization hits that worked doesnt mean confirmed