ok so i finally got my general ticket a few months back and ive been slowly figuring out HF. been making contacts and logging everything in WSJT-X and then pulling it into LOTW which took me forever to figure out but thats another story. anyway someone at my local club mentioned DXCC and said i should start working toward it and i looked it up on the ARRL site but honestly the way they explain it is kind of dense and im still confused about a few things.

so from what i understand you need 100 confirmed contacts with 100 different "entities" which is not the same as countries, right? like some islands count separately and some territories and stuff. but how do i actually know which ones count? is there a list somewhere thats easy to read or do i just trust what LOTW shows me when contacts get confirmed?

and the submission part, do you pay once and then submit updates later for free or is every submission a fee? i saw something about an annual fee situation but wasnt sure. also does it matter what band or mode or is any confirmed contact with a new entity just... a credit? sorry if these are dumb questions im just trying to understand before i get too deep into chasing stuff

not dumb questions at all, this stuff confused me for a while too when i first started chasing DX. so yeah entities are definitely not the same as countries — the ARRL has what they call the DXCC list and it has like 340 something current entities on it, some are just weird little islands or specific territories that have their own status for historical or political reasons. Bouvet Island is a good example, technically Norwegian but it counts as its own entity. there's a searchable list on the ARRL website and LOTW will actually show you the entity name when a contact gets confirmed so that makes it pretty easy to track.

for the credits — any mode, any band counts for the basic DXCC award as long as the contact is confirmed. so if you work someone on 40m FT8 and they upload to LOTW and it matches, thats a credit. once you hit 100 confirmed you apply for the basic award and yeah there's a fee, i think its around $15 for members but check the current price. after that you can apply for endorsements like Mixed, Phone, CW, and individual band awards, each of those has a fee too but its not crazy expensive. mixed is just whatever mode gets you there fastest.

honestly just keep logging everything and watch your LOTW totals, it'll start making sense real quick once the confirmations start rolling in

one thing nobody told me when i started was to also look at WAS and WAZ at the same time, like you might as well be chasing all three simultaneously since a lot of your contacts will count toward multiple awards. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is the 40 CQ zones. i actually finished WAS before DXCC because working US stations is obviously a lot easier but it was still satisfying to get that certificate. just something to think about so your logging and confirming effort does double or triple duty