ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to hear a lot about chasing DX and all these different awards and honestly im a little lost. like i understand the basic concept that you're trying to contact stations in different places but i dont really understand how the credits work or if you have to submit logs to someone or what.

from what i can tell DXCC is countries (well entities i guess), WAS is all 50 states, and WAZ is zones but i dont really know what zones means in this context. are these all run by the ARRL or different organizations? and do you have to pay for each one separately?

also i keep seeing people mention LoTW and i have an account but ive only uploaded maybe a dozen QSOs. someone at my club said i should be logging everything to LoTW from day one which i wish someone had told me earlier honestly. anyway if anyone can point me in the right direction id appreciate it, just looking to understand how all this works before i go too deep into chasing stuff

yeah you basically have it right. DXCC is run by the ARRL and requires 100 confirmed entities to get the basic certificate, though there are way more than 100 entities total so people keep chasing past that. WAS is also ARRL — all 50 states confirmed. WAZ is actually run by CQ Magazine, not ARRL, and the 40 zones are this international grid system that divides the world up, you can find a map online and it starts making sense pretty quick.

the credits thing — yeah you submit through LoTW for the ARRL awards mostly, and CQ has their own system for WAZ but LoTW confirmations are accepted there too now i believe. fees are pretty modest, like under $20 for most of them when you apply, but the real cost is the radio time ha.

and yes your club member is 100% right, log everything to LoTW from the start. i didnt do that my first couple years and i basically had to start over for award purposes. painful lesson. get your station callsign certificates set up properly and just make it part of your routine after every session.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started actually paying attention to this stuff a few months ago. what got me going was when i worked my first JA station on 20m and it just kind of clicked that this whole DX thing is actually really fun once you get a taste of it.

one thing that helped me was downloading the ARRL DXCC entity list PDF, its free and just going through it you start to get a feel for what counts as an entity vs just a country. like some islands or territories count separately even though theyre technically part of a bigger country, which is why the number is higher than the number of actual countries in the world.

anyway zones i still find confusing sometimes ngl but basically north america is a few zones, europe is a few, etc. look up a WAZ zone map and it makes more sense visually than trying to read about it