so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just starting to get into actually chasing DX instead of just ragchewing on the local repeater. someone at our club mentioned using DXwatch and QRZ together and i set both up but honestly im not totally sure im using them the most efficient way

like on DXwatch i can see spots coming in but sometimes the same station shows up 4 or 5 times and i cant tell if those are all different people spotting the same guy or if its like, network duplicates or whatever. and then QRZ has that little cluster tab but it seems to lag behind DXwatch by a few minutes sometimes? or maybe im imagining that

also is there a way to filter out the digital modes on those lists because right now im seeing a ton of FT8 spots and im mostly interested in SSB. not that theres anything wrong with FT8 just not what im focusing on right now. any tips from people who actually use these regularly would be great

yeah the duplicate spots are totally normal, thats just how the cluster network works — multiple stations around the world are all reporting the same DX so youll see the same callsign pop up several times in a short window. its actually useful because if youre seeing 4 or 5 spots its a pretty good sign the guy is actually there and not just a one-off bad spot. sometimes a single spot is a mistake or the band closed right after

for filtering out FT8 and the digital stuff, DXwatch has those mode filter buttons right at the top of the page, just uncheck FT8 and FT4 and youll clean up the list quite a bit. QRZ's cluster thing is fine for a quick look but yeah i find it a bit slow too, i just use DXwatch directly most of the time. if you really want to get into it, some guys run actual cluster client software like CC User or just telnet directly into a node but honestly the web tools are fine for casual DX chasing

im kind of in the same boat as you, been using dxwatch for maybe 3 months and still figuring it out. one thing i found that helped was the band filter — if you set it to just show 20m or wherever youre operating it cuts down the noise a lot. still learning the whole spotting thing myself honestly