okay so ive been licensed about four months now and i keep seeing people talk about QSL cards and LoTW and eQSL and honestly im not sure i understand the difference or if i even need to worry about all three. like i made maybe 30 contacts so far mostly on 40m ssb and a couple on ft8. do i need to be doing all of them or is one enough?

i signed up for LoTW because someone at my club said that was the most important one but then i saw people posting pictures of physical cards they got in the mail and those look really cool honestly. i guess my main question is — is LoTW just for awards and the physical cards are more of a hobby within the hobby thing? and what even is eQSL, is that separate from LoTW or the same system with a different name

sorry if this is a dumb question, the club guys kind of gloss over it like everybody already knows

not a dumb question at all, this confused me for a long time too. basically they're three completely separate things that accomplish roughly the same goal — confirming that both stations actually made the contact — but they're used in different contexts and the ham community has never really settled on just one.

LoTW is run by the ARRL and it's what you need for their awards like DXCC and WAS. the confirmation is cryptographically signed so it's pretty trustworthy, which is why the ARRL accepts it. eQSL is a different website run by a private company, it does basically the same thing electronically but not all awards programs accept it. and then paper cards are just... the old tradition that a lot of people genuinely enjoy. some dx stations still only confirm via paper, especially if they're in rare entities and get flooded with requests.

honestly for awards chasing you pretty much need LoTW, but if you're just enjoying the hobby and dont care about awards right now, dont stress about it. a lot of people do all three — upload to LoTW automatically through their logging software, opt into eQSL just in case, and then send physical cards to the ones that meant something to them. your first contact with a new country or a weird propagation path at 2am, that kind of thing.

yeah what he said. i'll add that the physical card thing really does become its own whole thing after a while. i started sending cards through the bureau maybe two years ago thinking it was kind of old fashioned and now i genuinely look forward to getting a stack of incoming cards every few months. there's something about holding a card from like a JA station or a 5B4 that a confirmation email just doesnt replicate for me personally.

the bureau system through the ARRL is really cheap if you're in the US, way cheaper than direct mailing. only downside is it takes forever, sometimes six months to a year to get cards back. direct mail is faster but you gotta include a self addressed envelope and return postage which gets expensive fast if you're doing it a lot.

ft8 contacts by the way — a lot of those stations have logging software that auto uploads to LoTW so your confirmations might already be piling up without you doing anything. check your LoTW account and see what's matched already, you might be surprised