so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just started getting into DX chasing, mostly on 20m and 17m. been using QRZ's logbook and the built-in spot lookup thing they have but a buddy told me i should also be checking DXwatch for cluster spots. so now i have like three tabs open at all times and im not totally sure im using any of them efficiently lol

basically what i'm doing is pulling up DXwatch to see whats active, then jumping over to QRZ to look up the callsign and see if its a new entity for me, then trying to find the freq and work them. feels like a lot of clicking around. is there a better workflow people use? also is there an app that kind of combines all this or at least makes it less clunky. i tried DX Toolkit on my phone but it crashed a couple times and i couldnt figure out how to filter by band

also slightly unrelated but does anyone use the AR-Cluster network directly through like a telnet connection anymore or is that kind of old school at this point? someone at the club mentioned it and i got curious

yeah the three-tab workflow is pretty common when you're starting out, dont feel bad about it. honestly a lot of us still do something similar. what helped me a lot was setting up DX4WIN or if you want free, look into using Log4OM — it has a built in cluster connection and will flag new entities automatically based on your log. saves a lot of the back-and-forth with QRZ.

as for telnet clusters, yeah people absolutely still use them, its not old school at all. most logging software can connect directly to a cluster node and youll get spots streaming in real time. DX Summit is basically a web front end for the same data. the AR-Cluster network is still very much alive. once you get your logging software pulling spots and cross-referencing your log automatically youll wonder how you managed without it

the phone apps are kind of hit or miss in my experience. Ham Radio Deluxe has a decent spot browser if youre already using that suite but i know its not free

omg i was doing the exact same thing a few months ago, so many tabs. what finally clicked for me was just picking one spot source and sticking with it for a while until i understood how it worked. i use DX Summit now mostly, you can filter by band and mode right on the page which helps a lot.

QRZ is more for looking someone up after the fact imo, like checking their bio or confirming the entity. for actual chasing in the moment i dont really use it for spots anymore