so ive been licensed about two years now and finally feel like im actually making real contacts instead of just fumbling around. a buddy at my local club mentioned i should start logging toward DXCC and honestly i had no idea what that even meant until i looked it up last week.

ok so i get the basic idea, 100 confirmed entities, but im confused about how the confirmation side works. like do i need paper QSLs or is LoTW the main way people do it now? i have a bunch of contacts in my log going back about 18 months and i never really thought about confirming any of them. are those still usable if the other station uploaded to LoTW?

also someone mentioned WAS and WAZ and i wasnt sure if those are totally separate awards or if contacts can count toward multiple things at once. seems like they should overlap but i honestly dont know how any of this is administered. is it all through ARRL or are some of these through different organizations

yeah LoTW is basically the go-to these days for DXCC credits, most serious DX stations upload pretty regularly so your old contacts might already have matches sitting there waiting for you. just create your LoTW account if you havent, install TQSL, and upload your log. when you get a match it shows up as a confirmed QSO and you can apply those toward DXCC. the paper QSL route still works and some guys prefer it especially for older or rarer entities where the station might not use LoTW, but for everyday stuff LoTW is way easier.

and yeah WAS and WAZ are totally separate awards. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is the 40 CQ zones around the world. contacts can absolutely count toward multiple awards simultaneously as long as the contact meets the rules for each one, so a QSO with a station in Texas might count for WAS if you needed Texas, and also contribute to your DXCC entity count if youre counting the US as an entity... well actually US is a bit of a special case but you get the idea. DXCC and WAS are both ARRL, WAZ is through CQ magazine. once you start going down this rabbit hole youll find there are a ton of awards out there, some people spend years chasing all of them.

I was in the exact same spot maybe a year ago, felt totally lost on all this. Honestly just upload your log to LoTW first and see what you already have confirmed, might be surprised. I had like 40 entities already matched before I even realized I was close to anything. The ARRL DXCC page has a pretty clear breakdown of the rules if you dig around on there.