so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and just started getting into chasing DX a bit more seriously. a buddy at my club told me to use dxwatch for cluster spots and qrz to look up the stations before i call them. makes sense i guess but im wondering if there's a better workflow or if people use other apps alongside these.

right now im basically keeping two browser tabs open and jumping back and forth which feels kinda clunky. i tried the clublog ios app for a bit but honestly didnt stick with it. someone mentioned pskreporter too but that seems more for ft8 monitoring than actual spotting? not totally sure.

also on dxwatch — does the filter actually work well for you guys? im trying to filter down to just 20m and 17m but sometimes spots for other bands still slip through, or maybe im just misreading the timestamps and they're old spots. hard to tell sometimes.

anyway just curious what other people are doing, especially if youre running a mostly HF setup and chasing entities on the cheaper end of the hobby without a full station automation thing going on

yeah pskreporter is definitely more of a propagation/wspr/ft8 tool, you're right about that. for actual dx cluster stuff i bounced around a lot before landing on DX Summit which pulls from the same underlying network as dxwatch but the filtering on summit feels a bit more reliable to me personally. that said dxwatch is fine and most guys at my club use it no problem.

the two-tab thing is pretty much what everyone does honestly. i know some of the fancier logging programs like log4om or even dx4win can pull spots directly into the software so you dont have to switch windows, but thats more setup than most people bother with when theyre just starting to chase dx casually. if you ever get into contesting the integrated spot browser becomes way more useful but for regular hunting it probably doesnt matter much.

one thing i'd say — dont sleep on the telnet cluster access if your logging software supports it. connecting direct to a node like gb7mbc or one of the na nodes gives you spots a few seconds faster than the web interfaces which actually does matter sometimes when a rare one pops up and the pileup fills in fast

i had the same confusion with the dxwatch filters when i started, took me a while to realize you gotta hit apply after changing the band or it just keeps showing everything. might be obvious but i felt dumb when i figured that out lol. also the timestamps are utc so if youre not used to that yet spots can look older or newer than they are depending on your timezone