ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and people keep talking about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i sort of nodded along like i knew what they were talking about but i really dont. i finally sat down and read the ARRL pages on it and now im even more confused because theres like basic DXCC and then endorsements and mixed mode and phone and CW and i dont even know what counts as an entity vs a country because apparently those arent the same thing??

i live in ohio so i figured WAS would be the easiest to start with since id just need all 50 states. ive already got maybe 25 or so confirmed on LoTW but some of those are from when my elmer let me make a few contacts on his station before i got my ticket so im guessing those dont count for my callsign. and WAZ is zones which i kind of get but i dont really know the zone map well enough yet.

anyway i guess my actual question is - should i just pick one and focus on it or is it normal to kind of work on all three at the same time without really thinking about it. does chasing one naturally help with the others or are they pretty separate goals

totally normal to be confused at first, took me a while to sort it all out too. the short answer is yeah working on one usually helps the others, especially DXCC and WAZ since a lot of DX entities are also in zones you need. WAS is really the odd one out because its all domestic but its also probably the most straightforward to finish if youre running decent power and a halfway decent antenna.

the entity vs country thing trips everyone up - basically the ARRL DXCC list has about 340 entities and some of them are territories or islands that are their own entity even though theyre technically part of another country politically. like Hawaii is its own entity separate from W6 land even though its a US state, same with alaska. once you get your head around that it starts to make sense.

my advice is just work everything you can and log it all in LoTW, let the credits sort themselves out. youll be surprised how fast WAS fills in if you hang around 40m in the evenings. dont stress about the mode endorsements yet, just get the basic awards first and worry about CW only or phone only later when youre more comfortable.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed 14 months and just applied for my WAS last week actually, pretty excited. one thing that helped me was just keeping a separate log note for which contacts were confirmed on LoTW vs just in my paper log because for the actual award submission you need the confirmations to line up. also yeah contacts made on someone elses callsign wont count unfortunately, learned that one the hard way when i asked about a Field Day contact i made as a guest op.

the zone map thing - just download a copy and tape it next to your radio for a while. you start to just know it after a bit.