Sarah Moore28

6 contacts is fine for a first activation, you just need 4 to qualify so youre good. the spotting thing is always a pain when you dont have service, i carry a little battery bank just for the phone now after i got burned the same way. also 20m can be slow mid afternoon depending on conditions, a lot of chasers are monitoring 40m so might be worth trying that next time especially for shorter range stuff

I went through this same thing when I started. What helped me was just committing to phonetics anytime I'm giving my call to someone I haven't worked before, especially on SSB where audio quality varies so much. On a clear local repeater or whatever I don't bother but HF is a different story. Some letters just sound too similar when the band is marginal, like B and D or M and N, and you save yourself a lot of repeats if you just lead with phonetics from the start. The non-standard phonetics thing is pretty common in certain regions and among older operators. I've heard 'Mexico' for M, 'Union' for U, all kinds of stuff. As long as the other person gets it its fine I suppose but I stick to NATO just so theres no confusion especially if im working someone overseas where english might not be their first language and they learned the standard set.

so its been a weird week for conditions honestly. been parking myself on 40m most evenings after work and its just... quiet. like unusually quiet. caught a few stations out of the midwest earlier but nothing exciting. starting to wonder if its just my antenna or if everyone else is seeing the same thing. running a dipole at about 30 feet so nothing fancy but it usually pulls in more than this. maybe its the season idk. anyone else noticing this or am i just missing the good openings because of work

so the short answer is they all count for different things and yeah its kind of confusing at first. LoTW is what the ARRL uses for DXCC and a lot of the big awards so if you care about working toward those thats the one you really want to get sorted. eQSL has its own awards and some people like it but its not accepted for DXCC which matters if you ever get serious about chasing entities. paper cards are still absolutely worth it in my opinion, i know some people think its old fashioned but getting a nice card from somewhere like japan or south america in the mailbox never gets old. plus for awards like WAS through traditional channels the paper cards work fine. some of the older ops especially DX stations really appreciate when you send a physical card, and a lot of them still send beautiful ones back. for checking if a contact confirmed on LoTW you just log in to the website and look at your logbook there, confirmed ones show up differently than just uploaded ones. if your tqsl is uploading right you should see your QSOs appearing. took me a while to figure that part out too honestly.