so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just got into chasing DX a little bit. a buddy at the club mentioned DXwatch and i've been poking around on it but honestly im not totally sure im using it the right way. like i can see the spots coming in and i can tell its showing me callsigns and frequencies but i dont really understand the filtering well enough to make it useful. right now im just staring at a wall of spots and trying to find ones that are on bands i can actually work

also someone mentioned there's a QRZ thing for this too? i use QRZ for lookups all the time but didnt know it had cluster functionality. is that a seperate subscription or is it part of the regular account? im on the free tier right now

any tips for someone just getting started with this stuff would be great, i have a technician ticket but im studying for general so my HF is limited to what i can do on 10m and a few other spots for now

yeah QRZ has a logbook and DX spotting section built in, its under the "DX" tab at the top of the site. the basic cluster feed is free i believe, though some of the logbook features need a subscription. honestly for just watching spots DXwatch is probably easier to use when youre starting out because the filtering interface is a little more straightforward.

what i'd suggest is filtering by band first — just check the boxes for 10m and 6m and ignore everything else for now until you get your general. there's also a continent filter which helps a lot when you're trying to find stuff that might actually propagate your way. once you get used to reading the spots it becomes pretty second nature, you start recognizing which DXpedition callsigns are active and which are just old stale spots from earlier in the day

also check out the DX summit site too, its been around forever and a lot of guys still prefer it. same basic idea but different layout

im in basically the same boat as you, just got my general a couple months ago and been trying to figure all this out. one thing that helped me was downloading the DX Toolbox app on my phone so i can check spots without having to be at the computer. not perfect but its nice when im setting up the radio and want to see whats active before i even sit down