so ive been licensed about two years now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and all these awards but i never really understood how the whole credit system works. like do you have to send in paper QSL cards or can you do it all through Logbook of the World? my elmer back when i first got licensed mentioned LoTW but kind of glossed over how it connects to actual award credit.

i've worked what i think is maybe 40 or 50 countries so far just messing around on 20m SSB and a little FT8 and someone in a pileup last week told me i should start logging more carefully if i want to chase DXCC. i guess i have been a little sloppy about confirming contacts and i dont even know how many of those 50 countries have actually confirmed back. is it too late to go back and get confirmations for older contacts or does it have to be done within a certain window?

also how does WAZ work, is that totally separate from DXCC or do the same contacts count toward both? feels like theres a whole universe of award chasing i never knew about and im not sure where to even start

Welcome to the rabbit hole, haha. Okay so the short version — LoTW is absolutely the way to go and yes your contacts can count toward multiple awards at once. Same QSO can count for DXCC, WAS, WAZ, whatever, as long as both sides have uploaded to LoTW and the match shows up. The ARRL processes DXCC credits through LoTW automatically once you apply, you dont have to do anything special per contact, just make sure you're uploading your logs regularly.

For your older contacts it's not too late at all, as long as the other station uploaded their log to LoTW at some point after the contact, it'll match regardless of when. I had contacts from 2019 that matched up in 2022 when the other op finally uploaded. So go back and upload everything you have, even the messy early logs.

WAZ is Worked All Zones, that's 40 CQ zones around the world, and yeah it's completely separate from DXCC which is country-based. Different award, different application, run by CQ magazine not ARRL. But again same contacts can count for both. My advice — get your LoTW account sorted first and start uploading consistently, everything else kind of falls into place once you can see your confirmed totals.

im basically in the same boat as you, been licensed 18 months and just started taking DXCC seriously maybe three months ago. one thing that helped me was downloading TQSL and just uploading all my old ADIF files at once, took like an hour but suddenly i had way more confirmations than i expected because a lot of the dx stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly.

also just a heads up, eQSL is a separate thing and those credits dont count for DXCC, i made that mistake early on thinking i was building toward the award but eQSL and LoTW are totally different systems. learned that the hard way lol