okay so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im starting to get lost. i thought DXCC was just the main award everyone chased but then someone in my local club mentioned they were working on their WAS and it sounded totally different. and then WAZ came up in a conversation and i nodded along like i understood but i definitely did not.

from what i can piece together DXCC is about working different countries or entities, WAS is working all 50 states, and WAZ is working all the CQ zones? is that right? and are these all tracked separately through different organizations? i think i heard DXCC is an ARRL thing but im not sure about the others.

also the credit submission thing confuses me a lot. do you have to pay every time you submit new credits or is there like an annual thing. and with lotw being a thing now do people even still send paper QSL cards for awards or is that mostly just for collecting at this point. sorry if these are dumb questions i just feel like everyone around me already knows all this stuff and i missed the memo somewhere

not dumb questions at all, these tripped me up for a long time too. you basically got the gist of it right - DXCC is ARRL and its about confirmed contacts with 100 or more DXCC entities (which is slightly different from countries, there are some weird edge cases like certain islands and territories that count separately). WAS is also ARRL and yeah its all 50 states. WAZ is CQ magazine's award and its the 40 CQ zones around the world, completely separate organization and separate tracking.

for credits with DXCC specifically, lotw has made it way easier. you upload your logs, the other station uploads theirs, they match automatically and boom thats a confirmed contact. you do pay a one time fee to get your initial DXCC certificate and then there are fees for endorsements as you hit higher levels like 150, 200 etc. its not outrageous but it adds up if you're chasing the high numbers. paper cards still count and some rare entities you basically have to use paper because the operator never bothers with lotw, but for day to day stuff lotw is the way to go. just get yourself enrolled in lotw sooner rather than later, it took me way too long to set it up and i lost credit for a bunch of early contacts because of it

yeah what he said. one thing i'd add is dont feel like you have to chase all three at once, i tried that early on and it just got overwhelming. i focused on WAS first because it felt more achievable and honestly working states taught me a lot about propagation and band conditions before i started really diving into the DX pile-ups. DXCC kind of naturally happened alongside it once i had my antenna situation sorted out.

the WAZ thing is genuinely tricky in spots, some of those zones are just hard to get a contact in because theres not much population or amateur radio activity there. zone 2 for example, good luck on a random Tuesday lol. but its a fun long term goal kind of thing