okay so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i thought they were all kind of the same thing but they're clearly not and im getting confused trying to figure out how to track everything.

right now i just have one log in WSJT-X and i manually copy contacts over to a spreadsheet which i know is probably dumb but it works for me so far. my question is do i need to keep separate logs for each award or does one log just... cover everything? like if i work a station in Wyoming on FT8 does that count toward WAS and also toward DXCC if Wyoming is an entity? (is it? i genuinely dont know)

also somebody at my local club mentioned something about LoTW confirmations being the only thing that counts for the official credits and now im worried i have contacts going back 6 months that the other stations never uploaded. is there any way to fix that or are those just lost?

so to answer your first question - one log covers everything, you dont need separate logs. most people use something like Log4OM or DXKeeper which will track your progress toward all the awards simultaneously, and LoTW does the same thing on the ARRL side once confirmations start rolling in. the key thing to understand is WAS is US states (all 50), DXCC is countries/entities (Wyoming is part of the US so it counts for WAS not as a separate DXCC entity), and WAZ is the 40 CQ zones worldwide. totally different criteria but the same contacts can count toward multiple awards at once which is nice.

as for the unconfirmed contacts, yeah unfortunately if the other op never uploads to LoTW theres not much you can do except send a QSL card the old fashioned way. some guys are really good about uploading, others never do. its kind of just part of the hobby. QRZ also has their own logbook system which some people find easier to get confirmations through, might be worth setting up an account there too and logging your contacts in both places.

been chasing DXCC for about 3 years now and honestly the LoTW thing frustrated me too at first. what helped me was just getting in the habit of uploading my own log to LoTW every week or so, and then slowly the confirmations trickle in over time. i've got contacts from like a year ago that just got confirmed last month because the other guy finally got around to uploading. so dont write those off completely.

also just a heads up - for DXCC you need 100 confirmed entities which sounds like a lot but with FT8 you can rack those up pretty fast if the bands are cooperating. i hit 100 in about 18 months working mostly digital modes on weekends. the harder part is getting to like 200+ where the rare DX starts mattering a lot more and you end up watching the DX cluster at weird hours hoping some island entity shows up. that part gets addictive real quick if im being honest