Worked All Zones and WPX: How to See Where You Actually Stand

It's the Monday after a contest weekend. You worked several hundred stations, the log is uploaded, and somewhere in that pile are CQ zones and prefixes you have never had confirmed before. The confirmations won't all arrive today, either — they trickle in over the following weeks, as the operators on the other end get round to uploading their side.

DxQSO now tracks your progress toward CQ Worked All Zones and CQ WPX from your LoTW® confirmations. Let me be straight about where that sits: your logging program almost certainly tracks these awards already, and so does LoTW itself. LoTW publishes its own WAZ and WPX award definitions, and the serious desktop loggers have counted CQ awards for years. We haven't invented award tracking, and if what you use today works for you, keep using it.

So this post is two things. First, a plain-English reference for what these two awards actually require — the rules are fiddlier than most people realize, whichever program you count them in. Second, an honest account of why DxQSO computes them as well, which comes down to where and when you find out.

What makes these two awards fiddly

DXCC is conceptually simple: one list of entities, and you either have an entity confirmed or you don't. The two big CQ awards are different in ways that catch people out — worth understanding whatever you use to count them.

WAZ looks small and isn't. There are only 40 CQ zones — few enough that you could almost track them on paper. But the award multiplies out across modes and bands, each with its own start date and its own rules, and suddenly there are twenty-odd separate things to count instead of one.

WPX has no list at all. There is no fixed set of prefixes to work through. The pool grows every time someone gets a new call or operates portable, so “how many prefixes do I have?” is a question you can only answer by counting — and the counting rules have edge cases.

Worked All Zones, in plain terms

WAZ is CQ's zone award: the world is divided into 40 CQ zones, and you work them. LoTW conveys confirmations to the CQ WAZ Award Manager, which is why LoTW confirmations are what DxQSO counts here. The rules below are CQ's official WAZ rules, the edition of 1 October 2017.

By mode. AM, SSB, CW and RTTY count from 14 November 1945; SSTV from 1 January 1973; Digital from 1 January 2000. Mixed is the old CW/Phone award, renamed.

By band. This is where it gets fiddly, so here it is as a table:

Note what that table is telling you: there is no mixed single-band award on the ordinary bands — each one has to be done in a single mode. And 160 m and 6 m are the exceptions in both directions: they are mixed-only, and they ask for fewer zones because they are genuinely harder.

5-Band WAZ. All 40 zones on each of 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 m — 200 in all, mixed mode only, for contacts after 1 January 1979. The first certificate comes at 150, and you must already hold a 40-zone WAZ before you apply.

WPX: Worked All Prefixes

WPX is Worked All Prefixes. One credit per distinct prefix, for contacts from 15 November 1945, on 160 through 6 m — 60 m included.

• Mixed needs 400 prefixes.
• CW, SSB and Digital need 300 each.
• Every award is endorsable in steps of 50.
• Band endorsements, per mode: 50 on 160 m; 175 on 80 and 60 m; 250 on 40, 30 and 6 m; 300 on 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 m.
• Continent endorsements, per mode: North America 160, Europe 160, South America 95, Africa 90, Asia 75, Oceania 60.

The hard part isn't the thresholds — it's working out what the prefix even is. CQ has specific rules for portable calls: W1AW/7 counts as W7, and FP/KV1J counts as FP0. Getting that right across tens of thousands of QSOs by hand is not realistic.

DxQSO doesn't try to reinvent it. It uses LoTW's own prefix — the PFX that LoTW sends with each confirmation — which has already applied CQ's portable-call rules. That covers the overwhelming majority of a typical logbook.

What you actually see

In DxQSO, go to Achievements → CQ Awards. There are two tabs, WAZ and WPX. Each award is a row showing what it requires and how many of your LoTW-confirmed QSLs count toward it, with the ones you have already qualified for marked. Click any count to open the breakdown — per-mode tabs for WAZ, bands and continents for WPX — so you can see not just the number but which zones or prefixes are behind it.

It is open to every DxQSO user, and there is nothing to switch on. If your LoTW account is connected, the numbers are already there.

So why does DxQSO count them as well?

That's a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a feature list. (The long version is its own post.)

It isn't the arithmetic — the arithmetic is the same everywhere, and the rules are public. The difference is where the answer lives. A logging program is what you use in the shack, while you are operating. That is exactly the right tool for that job, and DxQSO is not trying to replace it. DxQSO is the always-on cloud side: it keeps counting when the shack PC is off, and it reaches you when you are not at the radio at all.

In practice that means:

• It's wherever you are. Your standing is on your phone at work, in the car, or at the club meeting — not only on the machine under the desk at home.
• It comes to you. DxQSO is already watching LoTW around the clock, so a confirmation that moves one of these awards doesn't have to wait for you to open a program and run a report. It can just tell you.
• It isn't tied to one program. A contest logger at Field Day, something else at home, a phone in the field — the confirmations still land in one place.
• Your club can see it too. Standings roll up across club members, which is not something a single-operator logging program sets out to do.

Same awards, same rules, a different place to stand. If your logger already tells you what you need at the desk, that's genuinely fine — this is the same information for the hours you're not sitting at it.

What these pages do not do

Award pages get read by people who know the rules better than the people who write the software, so let me be precise about the limits.

• There is no “granted” column. Nobody publishes downloadable WAZ or WPX credits, so — unlike ARRL DXCC, where DxQSO can import the credits ARRL has actually granted you — everything on these two pages is what your confirmations show you hold, not what CQ has awarded you.
• These pages count LoTW confirmations. DxQSO also tracks QRZ confirmations, as a separate source, elsewhere in the app — but the CQ award pages are LoTW-based, and the two sets are never blended into one number.
• WAZ: satellite and EME are not checked, nor is the rule that all contacts must be made from one DXCC entity, nor the exclusion of maritime and aeronautical mobile stations. The page says so too.
• WPX: the Award of Excellence and the WPX Honor Roll are not computed. And if a portable call arrives without a prefix from LoTW, it cannot be counted — the page tells you exactly how many of your QSLs that affects rather than quietly dropping them.
• DxQSO does not submit anything for you. Applications go to CQ through their own process. What DxQSO gives you is an accurate picture of whether it's worth applying yet.

That last group matters more than it might look. An award tracker that quietly rounds the rules is worse than no tracker at all, because you find out at the application, not at the screen.

The contest-weekend routine

This is when it earns its keep. CQ WW DX SSB falls on the last full weekend of October — 24–25 October 2026 — and the CW weekend on 28–29 November. Those two weekends move more zones and prefixes than the rest of the year put together.

1. Operate the contest and log it in whatever you already use.
2. Upload as you normally would. DxQSO syncs your LoTW confirmations in the background, around the clock.
3. Come back to Achievements → CQ Awards when the confirmations start landing, and see what moved.

Because confirmations arrive over days and weeks as the other operators upload, this is exactly the kind of thing worth having an alert for rather than a browser tab you keep re-checking.

It works with the logger you already use

None of this asks you to change how you operate. Keep logging in DXKeeper, N3FJP, Log4OM, N1MM+, Ham Radio Deluxe, WSJT-X — whatever you like. DxQSO reads your confirmations and does the counting; it does not replace your logging program and is not trying to. If you run a contest logger that speaks N1MM UDP, the Network Listener can capture QSOs as you work them, so the contest flows in without an export step.

None of this replaces the program you log in, and it isn't trying to. Work the contest, upload the log, and let your standing follow you out of the shack.

73,
Steve, N1EZ

Worked All Zones and WPX are awards of CQ Amateur Radio. LoTW® is a registered trademark of the American Radio Relay League. DxQSO is not affiliated with or endorsed by CQ or the ARRL.