ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i thought they were all kind of the same thing but theyre not right? like i get that DXCC is countries and WAS is states but then whats WAZ and how do the zones work exactly

also i started logging contacts in WSJT-X and some of them go into LoTW automatically i think but i have no idea if any of those count toward anything yet. do i have to apply for the awards separately or does LoTW just track it all and tell you when youre close? my elmer kind of glossed over this part and i dont want to bother him again about something i could probably figure out myself

basically just looking for someone to point me in the right direction, not looking for a whole lecture just a nudge lol

so the short version - WAS is all 50 US states, DXCC is 100 entities (not countries exactly, its a specific ARRL list that includes things like islands and territories that arent their own countries), and WAZ is Worked All Zones which is the 40 CQ zones the world gets divided into. totally different goals but a lot of people chase all three at once since theres a lot of overlap in the chasing

LoTW does track your confirmed contacts and you can see your totals in your account but it doesnt automatically apply for anything. you gotta go to the ARRL awards page and actually submit when youre ready. for DXCC you need 100 confirmed entities, so LoTW confirmations count but you can also use paper QSL cards if you get them verified. WAZ is run by CQ magazine not ARRL so thats a separate submission process over there

honestly at 8 months you might already be closer to WAS than you think if youve been doing FT8 regularly. worth checking your LoTW account and just poking around the confirmed list

yeah what he said basically. i will add that when i started chasing DXCC i got kind of obsessed with checking DX clusters for new entities and it honestly made the hobby way more fun than i expected. you start hearing a pileup on like Bouvet Island or something and suddenly you understand why people lose their minds over this stuff

dont stress too much about understanding every rule right away, just keep logging and confirming on LoTW and it starts to make sense pretty quick