ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, got a few hundred in the log at this point. people keep mentioning LoTW and eQSL and i honestly dont fully understand the difference or which one i should be bothering with. i went to the ARRL site to sign up for LoTW and the whole certificate thing kind of confused me and i gave up halfway through.

also do people still actually send paper QSL cards? ive gotten a few in the mail from DX contacts and theyre really cool but i dont know if im supposed to send one back or how that even works. do you just mail it directly to the other person or is there a bureau thing? im in the US if that matters. just want to make sure im not being rude to people by not confirming contacts i guess

so the short version is LoTW is what you want for DXCC and most of the serious award chasing — it's run by ARRL and the confirmations are cryptographically signed so they carry more weight for awards. the certificate setup is annoying yeah, but once you get through it it's pretty painless. if you havent already, reach out to your local club because a lot of elmers will just sit down with you and walk through the whole tqsl process in like 20 minutes, saved me a ton of headache when i was starting out.

eQSL is a bit more casual, some people use it some dont, and it's generally not accepted for official ARRL awards but there are some other awards that take it. i use both personally just to cover my bases.

paper cards — yes people absolutely still send them, especially DX stations. if someone sends you a card it's generally good form to send one back. you can mail direct to the address on the card or look them up on QRZ. the bureau system exists for when you have a pile of cards going to the same country and dont want to pay a ton of postage, your national society handles routing. for just a few cards though, mailing direct is fine and honestly the DX stations seem to appreciate it more than going through the bureau which can take like a year or more to arrive.

i was in the same boat like a year ago, the LoTW certificate thing is honestly the most confusing part and once its done you forget it ever happened. one thing i'll add — definitely get your QRZ logbook set up too even if its not the same as LoTW, a lot of people check there and it can auto-sync confirmations. and yeah send paper cards back when you get them, i got my first one from a JA station and it made my whole week honestly