so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just done casual rag chewing and some local nets but lately ive been getting really into DX and i think i want to actually go for DXCC properly. right now i have maybe 40-something entities confirmed in LoTW but i was never really paying attention to it, just logging stuff and uploading occasionally.

my question is about how the credits actually work for mixed vs phone vs cw etc. like if i confirm the same entity on both SSB and FT8 does that count for both the phone endorsement and the digital endorsement separately? and does it also count toward the basic mixed DXCC at the same time? i feel like i read something about this but i cant find it again on the ARRL site, the award rules page is kind of dense.

also wondering if people generally go for WAS at the same time or kind of pick one and focus. i have most states i think but again wasnt really tracking it. alaska and hawaii are the usual suspects still missing lol. anyway any advice from people who have been through this appreciated

yeah the way it works is each confirmed contact can credit toward multiple awards at once so if you work say Reunion Island on FT8 and get it confirmed in LoTW, that single QSO counts for your mixed DXCC, your digital DXCC, and also toward WAZ if you still need zone 39. the mode endorsements are separate awards you can apply for independently once you hit 100 confirmed on that specific mode. so SSB DXCC needs 100 confirmed on phone, CW needs 100 on CW, and so on. it all feeds from the same pool of LoTW confirmations though which is nice.

for WAS i would honestly just run it parallel, its not that much extra effort once youre already logging and uploading to LoTW. alaska tends to show up on 40m and 17m pretty regularly and hawaii is honestly easier than people expect, theres usually someone on from KH6 on the weekends especially during contests. just make sure you have LoTW set up correctly and your grid and location info is right or youll have headaches later submitting anything.

im kind of in the same boat as you, started actually tracking last year and now im at 87 confirmed mixed and its kind of addictive honestly. the WAZ thing i just do at the same time, zone 2 has been killing me for months though. my suggestion is get the DX Atlas software or even just a free online entity checker so you can see what you still need at a glance, makes it way easier to know when to jump on a pileup vs skip it because you already have that one.