so ive been licensed about 8 months now and finally starting to get into chasing DX a little bit. someone at my club mentioned DXwatch and i've been using it alongside the QRZ logbook and also poking around on the QRZ DX cluster spotting thing. my question is basically — are these pulling from the same spots or are they totally separate networks? because sometimes i see a spot on DXwatch that doesn't show up on QRZ for like 10-15 minutes and other times QRZ has stuff that DXwatch doesnt seem to have at all.

also is there a better app for this on android? ive been using Ham Radio Deluxe for logging but the built in cluster stuff feels kind of clunky to me and i keep having to scroll around to find what im actually looking for. a buddy at the club uses some app called DX Sherpa or something like that but i couldn't find it in the play store.

not trying to overcomplicate things, just want to know when something is on 17m so i can actually get to the radio before the pile-up is completely hopeless lol

yeah they're pulling from different aggregator sources which is why you see the delay sometimes. DXwatch pulls from a bunch of the traditional DX cluster nodes like the old telnet cluster network, and QRZ does its own thing — i think they have some overlap but they definitely aren't the same feed. honestly for real-time stuff a lot of guys just telnet directly into a cluster node like W3LPL or one of the big ones. you can do that right in HRD if you dig into the settings a bit, just point it at a node close to you geographically and you'll see spots faster than any web tool.

for android, try DXspider or look for DX Toolbox, i think thats the one your buddy might have meant. there's also one called Ham Radio Today that has a cluster view built in. honestly the web-based stuff on DXwatch is fine once you figure out the filters — you can narrow it down to just the bands you care about which helps a lot with the noise.

im in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started messing with DX clusters a couple months ago. the 15 minute delay thing drove me crazy too until i realized i had the auto-refresh turned off on DXwatch. theres a little settings thing at the top where you can set it to refresh every 30 seconds or whatever, that helped me a lot. still not instant but way better than i was getting before.

the QRZ one is actually pretty decent i think for casual use, i usually have both open in different tabs and just glance between them. probably not the most efficient workflow but it works for me when im just trying to catch a new one on 20m or whatever.