so i've been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just ragchewed on 40m and did some local stuff but last month i worked my first legitimate DX pile up — caught a ZL station on 20m and something just clicked for me. been hooked ever since.

i went and read all the ARRL DXCC rules and honestly my brain kind of melted halfway through. i get the basic concept, 100 entities confirmed, submit your QSL cards or use LoTW, whatever. but a few things are confusing me.

first off — do i need to submit all 100 at once or can i submit as i go? i have maybe 35-40 entities worked so far and probably 20 confirmed on LoTW already. also is WAS totally separate from DXCC like do you just apply for them independently or is there some combined tracking thing i'm missing. and WAZ i barely even understand, is that the 40 zones thing? i found the CQ zone map but figuring out which zone a country falls in isnt always obvious to me.

anyway sorry for the wall of text im just genuinely excited about this and dont want to waste QSLs or submit stuff wrong and lose credit somehow

welcome to the rabbit hole, you're never getting out haha. no seriously congrats on getting bit by the DX bug, its a great part of the hobby.

to answer your questions — yes WAS and DXCC are completely separate awards, different organizations even. DXCC is ARRL, WAS is also ARRL actually but they track them independently. WAZ is CQ magazine's award and yeah its the 40 CQ zones, totally different system from DXCC entities. you can work the same station and it might count toward all three depending on where they are and what zone they're in, which is kind of the fun part when it all lines up.

for DXCC you dont need to wait until you have 100 to apply. you can submit a batch whenever you feel like it, some people submit at like 50 or 75 just to get the ball rolling and make sure their log is in order. i'd honestly just keep logging everything carefully, make sure your LoTW account is set up right with the right TQSL certificates and callsign, and let the confirmations pile up. LoTW is really the way to go these days, paper QSLs are slow and expensive.

one thing i'll mention — double check your log dates and times are in UTC. sounds basic but ive seen guys lose confirmations because their logging software was set to local time. just something to verify early on before you have hundreds of QSOs to fix.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at DXCC for about a year now and sitting at 87 confirmed on LoTW. the zone thing tripped me up too — i just keep a CQ zone reference sheet bookmarked and check it before i log anything for WAZ tracking. most logging software like Log4OM or DXKeeper will actually show you the zone automatically when you enter the callsign prefix so that helps a lot.

also worth knowing that some entities that count for DXCC are in the same CQ zone as a dozen other places, so WAZ actually gets easier in some ways once youve worked a bunch of DXCC stuff. the hard zones for me have been like zone 2 and some of the pacific ones. 73