Having a Look at DX Cluster Spots

I have been hearing about DX Cluster Spots on Twitter and occasionally on telecons with local Hams. A search for DX Cluster Spots brought in two sites which were of interest to me. I have created an account at DXWATCH.COM. I have started monitoring the site whenever I monitor the waterfall display in my radio. When I see a spot sent by someone near my region, I look at the waterfall display to see if there is anything there. Most often I find nothing. Sometimes I try typing the frequency into my radio display and occasionally I am lucky to hear the spotted the station. But that is very rare. So far I have not been able to work any such station. Yet my friends say that they have been able to work them. May be I am not lucky because of my limited setup.

I have started sending DX spots whenever I work a DX station or even hear one. I hope that someone will be benefitted by it. I have not found a method of finding out whether my spots have been useful to anyone. Various filters available are useful to find out the activity region wise and band wise. I usually monitor bandwise as the activity region wise is very low from my region. By using region wise filter I could find out operators from my region and nearby regions who are regularly submitting spots to the website. I could also learn from one of them that when you use WSJT-X for FT8, spots can be automatically submitted to the site.

Another site which I have started looking at later is MY DX SUMMIT. Being a bit lazy to create more accounts, I have not created a login there and I am not posting anything there. The filters open in the same page on this site. There are include selections and exclude selections available as filters. Latest Breaking DX News seems to be grossly outdated, with the latest post dated 2017. I think the news feed site has become nonfunctional.