so ive been playing around with dx spotting networks for a few months now and i think i finally have a workflow that makes sense but wanted to see what others are doing. basically i have qrz.com open on one tab with the logbook and the dx spots they show there, and then dxwatch open in another tab because the filtering on dxwatch seems a little better to me? like i can narrow down by band more easily without having to scroll through a ton of ft8 spots when im trying to work ssb.

also been messing with the cluster on hamspots and a couple android apps, one called dxsummit i think but it might just be a wrapper for the website. my question is really whether theres any advantage to connecting to an actual telnet cluster versus just using these web interfaces. feels like the web stuff refreshes often enough but idk if im missing spots or if theres a lag i cant see. been on general class for about 8 months, hf setup is an ic-7300 and a dipole in the attic so im not chasing rare dx or anything, mostly just trying to find activity on 40 and 20.

the telnet cluster question is a good one — for casual operating the web interfaces are totally fine honestly. dxwatch pulls from multiple cluster nodes so youre not really missing much. where telnet starts to matter is if you're running logging software like n1mm or log4om and want spots to feed directly into your bandmap, that's where it gets really useful. but for just eyeballing whats active on a band the websites do the job.

one thing i do like about connecting directly through the software is you can send your own spots and also do dx alerts for specific callsigns or entities, some of the web tools dont let you do that as cleanly. but again if youre just hunting around on 40m for ragchews or whatever, dont overthink it. the workflow you have sounds fine to me.

im in almost the exact same boat, got my general last year and just started getting into hf properly. i use the clublog livemap sometimes too which is kinda fun to just watch spots pop up around the world even if im not actively hunting anything. and yeah the dxsummit app is basically just the website in an app shell lol but it works ok for a quick check when im not at the radio.