ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get into chasing awards and i keep seeing people talk about uploading to LoTW and eQSL and also sending physical cards and im honestly not sure what the difference even matters for. like do i need to be on all three systems or is one good enough?

i set up my LoTW account a few months ago and i think i uploaded my logs but im not 100% sure the tqsl signing thing worked right because i never got any confirmations back. eQSL i havent even touched yet. and physical cards i got a batch made up but havent sent any out yet because i wasnt sure if i should wait for someone to send me one first or just send them out automatically.

any advice from people who actually do this regularly would be great, im trying to work toward my WAS eventually so i want to make sure im doing this right from the start

so for WAS through the ARRL you basically need LoTW or physical cards — eQSL doesnt count for that one unfortunately. but eQSL has its own awards program and a lot of DX stations use it so its still worth signing up for. i run all three just because you never know what the other station prefers and it costs nothing extra once youre set up.

the tqsl thing tripping you up is super common. what you want to check is whether your callsign certificate is actually signed and valid — open tqsl and look under the callsign certificates tab, it should say something about the certificate being current. if you uploaded logs before getting that sorted the QSOs probably didnt go through. happened to me when i first started and i had to redo about 3 months of contacts.

for physical cards i just send them out to anyone who sends me one first, that way i dont burn through my whole stock on stations that arent interested. some guys do send first automatically and thats fine too, just depends on how many cards you had printed and your budget for postage. if youre going after WAS you'll probably want to keep some cards on hand for the states that are barely active on LoTW.

yeah I was in the same boat not that long ago. I'll be honest eQSL felt kind of pointless to me at first but then I worked a station in Reunion Island and he only confirmed on eQSL so now I upload to all three after every operating session just out of habit. takes maybe five extra minutes.

one thing nobody told me early on — make sure your grid square is filled in correctly in your logging software before you upload anywhere, because fixing it after the fact on LoTW is a pain and some awards need it