ok so ive been licensed for about 3 years and mostly just did local stuff, some contests here and there, never really paid attention to logging entities or anything like that. but i've been reading about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and now i'm kind of obsessed with the idea of actually chasing these things properly.

problem is i don't really know where to start. like do i need to have been logging everything with the right info from the beginning? i have like 800 QSOs in my log but honestly a lot of them are sloppy, missing RST, some dont even have the right time offset because i hadn't set my computer clock right. are those contacts just worthless for award purposes or can i still submit them?

also i keep seeing people talk about LoTW and i set up an account like a year ago but never really used it. is that basically mandatory at this point if you want credit for anything or do paper QSLs still hold up for DXCC? sorry for the wall of text, just trying to figure out the whole ecosystem before i dive in deeper

don't stress about the old log entries too much — for DXCC purposes the main things you need are the callsign, band, mode, and date/time in UTC. if you're missing RST that's fine, ARRL doesn't care about signal reports for award credit. the clock thing could be a problem if you're off by more than a few minutes but honestly for most garden variety contacts it probably wont matter unless you're trying to claim something from a rare DXpedition where the log might be checked against theirs.

LoTW is basically the way to go these days yeah. paper QSLs still work and some entities still require them because the DX station never uploaded to LoTW, but for the bulk of your contacts you'll want everything going through LoTW. get your certificate loaded up and start uploading, it's a little clunky the first time but once it's set up it just runs. also look at Club Log, a lot of DXpeditions use it for OQRS which is how you request a QSL from them directly without having to deal with a bureau.

same boat as you honestly, i just hit 100 entities confirmed on LoTW last month and it kind of snuck up on me. i wasnt really chasing it either and then i uploaded a bunch of old logs and suddenly had like 80 confirmed. WAS took me longer weirdly because i kept missing the same three or four states. Delaware was my white whale for like six months.

one thing i'd say is don't sleep on 40m and 17m for chasing entities. everybody talks about 20m and yeah it's the workhorse but sometimes the pileups are just brutal and you can find the same station working a much thinner pile on 17. good luck with it, it's genuinely addictive once you start watching your totals go up