Was just poking around my LOTW account and discovered that I have 195 out of 200 5BWAZ zones confirmed.
I did not expect to see that.
It gets better. There may be some sort of bug (relating, primarily, to my old WO0Z QSOs). I looked up the missing five and they are LOTW credited. Why they do not show up in my 5BWAZ list is the mystery. (N. B. I have the actual 200 zones credited long since -- this is just noticing about LOTW confirmations).
But even if it was merely 195, that's still way more than I expected. Some of those zones are hard to get from the US and they come from places in the world where LOTW is less successful in getting DX to sign up.
All 200, if I could get the system to recognize it, is even more amazing to me. Note that I am not claiming any special virtue here, other than doggedly pursuing the award originally and informally doing a not-to-be-credited-officially "second time" chase here in Arizona. In short, the only virtue I can claim here is hitting zones hard and paying attention.
This is all about LOTW penetration.
Similarly, my WPX totals are really whacko large and well above the minimums required for just about any WPX award there ever was. That doesn't require anything like the 97.5 to 100 per cent confirmation level of 5BWAZ as recited above, but it still represents a whole incredible boatload of LOTW confirmations. Whether I am interested or not, it is still a pretty high level of achievement thanks to LOTW. I don't know why they set their various minimums where they did in that program, but they look anachronistically low to me today.
WPX gets pricey in LOTW, even at 12 cents per credit, but if you sign up for eQSL at even Bronze, you can always get those credited first and then, the awards manager will ensure that you only have to apply for the residual (that is, if the same QSO is credited in eQSL also, about half the time true, you don't have to pay LOTW fees to get credit. So, you can estimate your probable WPX cost at about half of what your LOTW award sheet shows). About six cents a card is hard to beat.
Setting aside cost, it is really making me wonder about cards and how many one might need.
My raw LOTW confirmation rate in 2022 and 2023 so far, is 80 per cent. Never thought it would get that high. If your math goes back to the start of your participation, it will always look lower than it now is.
LOTW remains a slow motion revolution in confirmations.
If one is going for DXCC Challene 2000, one might have to work as many as 2500 counters to avoid cards, but actually, much better. It is probably more like 2200 counters or less to dispense with cards. Two QSOs for the same band slot should get you one of them credited 96 per cent of the time now (says theory and practice).
None of this is meant to disparage anyone who loves cards and collects them, especially for rare places.
I'm simply suggesting that we can at least dispense with the physical cards in the vast majority of cases. More than one might expect.
I've just gotten done applying using paper and applying using LOTW. I turned in something like 65 counters in seconds with LOTW. My fee approximately doubled, but it wasn't all that much to start with. The paper version has 17 entries and, not counting the car ride to and from the checker, consumed at least two, three, maybe four times as much time.
All of this means you can probably expect to only apply for between four and ten per cent of your "slots" using cards.
For anything.