so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general class) and i finally started getting into chasing DX a little bit. someone at my club mentioned dxwatch and i've been poking around on it but honestly im not totally sure how to use it alongside qrz lookups efficiently. like right now my workflow is i see a spot come in on dxwatch, i copy the callsign, then i open a new tab and paste it into qrz to see what entity it is and check if i need it for my log. feels like there has to be a better way.

also are there other cluster networks i should be looking at? someone mentioned dx summit but i dont know if thats different data or the same spots just displayed differently. and is there an app that kind of combines all of this in one place? ive tried a couple android apps but they either crash or the UI is really confusing. just looking for what other people actually use day to day.

yeah dx summit and dxwatch are pulling from different cluster nodes so you'll sometimes see spots on one that dont show up on the other, at least not right away. worth having both open if you're serious about not missing stuff. for combining the lookup part, a lot of people use log4om or dxkeeper and those will do an automatic qrz lookup when you click a spot in the bandmap — saves a ton of tab switching. if you're on android, ham radio deluxe has a companion app but honestly i've had mixed results with it. DX Toolkit was decent last i checked but i havent used it in about a year so no idea if its still maintained.

the workflow you're describing isnt wrong, it's just a bit manual. once you get logging software that talks to a cluster feed directly it kind of all clicks into place. took me a while to get there too.

clublog is worth bookmarking too, especially for checking if a callsign is a new one for you. you can upload your adif and then when you look up a call it'll tell you right there if its a new entity or band slot. i stumbled onto that maybe a year into the hobby and wished someone had told me sooner. not exactly a cluster but it fits into the same workflow you're talking about.