so ive been trying to get into DX chasing more seriously and someone at my club mentioned i should be using cluster spots to find activity. ive been poking around on DXwatch and also the cluster thing built into QRZ and honestly im a little confused about whether theyre pulling from the same data or not because sometimes ill see a spot on one and not the other for the same callsign.

im also not totally sure how to filter it down so im not drowning in HF spots when i mostly operate on like 17m and 20m. there seems to be a band filter somewhere on DXwatch but it didnt seem to stick last time i tried it. maybe a browser thing? anyway if anyone has a good workflow for using these tools together id love to hear it, im running a FT-891 into a dipole so nothing fancy but ive been making some decent contacts lately and want to find more rare ones before the solar cycle peaks and everyone forgets about propagation again lol

yeah the data isnt always the same — they pull from overlapping but not identical node networks. QRZ tends to aggregate a bit differently and sometimes theres a lag. DXwatch is pretty solid for realtime stuff but i usually have both open in separate tabs honestly, its just habit at this point.

for filtering on DXwatch there should be a little gear or settings icon depending on which version youre looking at, and you can set it to only show certain bands. it does sometimes reset if you havent made an account and logged in, thats probably whats happening to you. once you save a filter while logged in it sticks between sessions at least on my end.

with a dipole on 17 and 20 you can definitely work some good stuff when the bands are open, just keep an eye on the spot timestamps because a pileup can be over in 10 minutes sometimes and you dont want to show up for a DX station thats already gone QRT

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first started checking spots. what helped me was also downloading the HamAlert app on my phone — you set up triggers like a specific callsign or DXCC entity and it pings you when something shows up in the cluster. saved me from missing a few rare ones while i was doing other stuff around the house. its free and works pretty well, only thing is you gotta make sure your notification settings are right or it just silently does nothing which took me an embarassingly long time to figure out