DX cluster & band map

Step by step

Connecting

Press Ctrl+D and go to the Clusters tab.
Pick a cluster server (a node) from the list of 231. Use the search box to find one by name or port, e.g. pi4.
Double-click it to put it in the connection frame at the bottom. Or add your own with + Add.
Your callsign is the login. Press Connect.
Tick Auto reconnect to connect at every start, and again after a node drops you.

You can add, edit and delete entries in the list. Program updates keep your changes.

Log in only once per callsign - most nodes refuse a second login. With several PCs in one shack, see One connection for the whole shack.

The Clusters tab: 231 hosts with a search box, and the connection frame — Searchable node list, with the connection frame underneath.

The main tab

The Spots tab

Each row is one spot: the station and its country, the frequency, the comment, who spotted it and when.

Why a spot is coloured

The colours

The colour shows what your own logbook says about the spotted station on that band:

Colour	The spotted station is
Purple	you - your own callsign or operator call was spotted (also with /P or a prefix)
Red	on your alert list
Dark orange	worked today, on this band
Yellow	worked today, on another band
Dark green	worked before, on this band
Light blue	worked before, on another band
White	never worked - go get it

The colours are also named along the bottom of the window.

What that gets you

A white line among coloured ones is a station you have never worked, on the air right now. One click takes you there. No wanted list to keep up: it all comes from your log.

Working one

One click to the station

Click a spot: the radio goes to the frequency and mode, and the callsign is filled in, just as if you had typed it.
QO-100: with the rig preset in QO-100 mode, a spot on the downlink (10489.500 - 10490.000 MHz) tunes the radio to the matching uplink.
The mode comes from the spot's comment (e.g. RTTY). If the comment names no mode, the frequency decides.

What the radio is set to:

Spot	Radio
CW	CW
RTTY	RTTY if Key Master keys FSK, PKTLSB if it sends AFSK
FT8, FT4, PSK31, OLIVIA…	PKTUSB (or USB, see below)
Phone, or no mode known	LSB below 10 MHz, USB from 10 MHz up and on 60 m

Settings → Rig Control → DX Cluster spots: untick Set the radio's mode when a spot is clicked and only the frequency goes to the radio. There you also choose PKTUSB or USB for data modes; pick USB if your radio has no data mode.
If Key Master is open, the call goes into its quick log as well.

Narrowing it down

The four filters, and they stack

Filter	What it does
Band	A button per band, 160 m up to 6 cm and 3 cm; select several at once. Selected buttons are blue. ALL clears them.
Mode	ALL, CW, FT8, FT4, RTTY, DIGITAL or PHONE, decided by where the spot is in the band. The table behind it is the IARU R1 band plan, gone over band by band: every frequency in every band belongs to exactly one of them, so no spot can fall out of all the filters at once. RTTY runs up to where the voice section starts on the five contest bands - 14.150 on 20 m, not 14.099 - because a RTTY weekend fills that. The table is `dxcluster_modes.json` in your settings folder, and you may edit it.
Regex	A saved list of search patterns (regular expressions) for anything else: only QRP spots, only one prefix, nothing with FT8 in it.
Spotter and DX	By continent: only European spotters, only DX from Asia, or both.

Filters combine and work straight away, on the spots already in the list too. Clear a filter and the hidden spots come back.

Filter by band: a button per band, several selected at once — Four bands at once.

The mode filter: ALL, CW, FT8, FT4, DIGITAL, PHONE — Mode filter.

Spotter filter and DX filter, per continent — Who spots, and who is spotted.

Chasing one station

Alerts

Click Edit Filter beside Alerts and type the callsigns you are chasing, separated by commas. When one is spotted it shows red, with a sound if you want one.

Red always wins over the other colours.
In Key Master, right-click a callsign in the decoded text to add it to the list.

Edit Callsign Alert Filter: the calls you are chasing, separated by commas — The calls you are chasing.

The spotting frame: callsign, frequency and comment, with Send Spot — Your own spot: three fields and a button.

Giving something back

Sending your own spot

Fill in callsign, frequency and comment at the top of the Spots tab and press Send Spot.
A QSO you just logged fills them in for you. A QSO from WSJT-X even gets a comment like FT8 -12 JO22TC <> KO32AB TNX QSO. Send it as is, or change it.

The raw session

The console

The Console tab shows everything the node sends, as plain text, with a line to type commands such as sh/dx or set/filter - whatever your node understands.

Use it when you need to talk to the node, or to see why a spot did not show up.

The Console tab: the raw cluster session with a command line — The raw session, with a command line.

The band, drawn

The band map

Band Map opens a picture of the band you are on. It follows your radio and shows the spots in their colours, with their age.

Click a spot on the map: the radio goes there and the call is filled in.
Tick Open with DX Cluster to open it together with the cluster window. Off by default.

The band map: spots along the band, following the VFO — The band map follows the radio.

Multi-Op

One connection for the whole shack

With several PCs in a contest, one PC is the master: it connects to the cluster and passes every spot on to the others over the local network. That way your callsign logs in only once.

Tick the Master column in Network Stations and confirm.
The other PCs show the master's spots. The window says which PC and node they come from.
The other PCs can still send spots; they go out through the master.
On those PCs the Clusters tab is greyed out until the master is gone or the contest is closed.