ok so ive been licensed for about 14 months now and people keep telling me i should start working toward DXCC but honestly the whole thing feels kind of overwhelming. like i get the basic idea, you need 100 confirmed entities, but then you start reading about LoTW and paper QSLs and mixed mode credits and deleted entities and i just kind of get lost

i've been logging everything since i got my general so i probably have a decent pile of QSOs in there already, maybe 800 or so, but i havent been uploading to LoTW consistently which i guess is a problem. also working mostly 40m and some 20m if that matters

is it worth submitting what i have to ARRL now just to get a baseline number, or should i wait until im closer to 100? and whats the deal with WAS vs DXCC, is it better to chase one at a time or just work everything and let the awards sort themselves out

any advice appreciated, im not in a huge rush just want to make sure im doing it right

honestly just start uploading everything to LoTW right now, dont wait. every QSO you make going forward should go up within a day or two if you can manage it. the other station might upload theirs months later and suddenly you get a confirmation you forgot about - happened to me with a 3Y contact that finally matched like 8 months after the fact

as for whether to chase WAS and DXCC at the same time, most people kind of do both naturally since US stations count for WAS and working stateside is also just... what happens when you're on 40m. so dont stress about separating them. just work DX when it shows up, work stateside when you feel like it, and check your totals every few weeks. its actually pretty fun watching the numbers creep up

one thing i'd say though - get a paper QSL card from at least a few really rare ones as backup. LoTW is great but not every DXpedition uploads promptly and some smaller operations never do. the card is your safety net

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at it about two years and just hit 98 confirmed entities last week so im close but not there yet lol. the thing that helped me most was just getting on 20m during morning and evening when propagation is good and just calling anything that sounded far away. sounds obvious but i wasted a lot of time early on just calling CQ instead of hunting

also check the DX cluster even if it feels chaotic at first - once you figure out which spots are real vs busted calls it becomes pretty useful for knowing whos on. WAZ is fun too btw, zone awards kind of sneak up on you once you have a good chunk of DXCC entities