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DX Chasing

The DX Chasing tab is where you find distant countries on the air and log them as you work them. It sits in the sidebar right beside the Parks on the Air group — whose Hunting entry is its POTA sibling — and it works the same way: a live spot list beside a map, with one-tap logging into folders that organize themselves.

Where POTA hunting revolves around parks, DX chasing revolves around countries — DXCC entities, the country list ham radio scores DX against. Every spot, contact, and folder in this tab is keyed to an entity, and Hamtrax is strict about them: only current entities from the official ADIF entity list are accepted, so a typo or a deleted entity is rejected rather than guessed.

You can watch the DX feed without an account

Signed out, hamtrax.com carries a DX tab of its own, after Home, Hunt, and Activate — the same live cluster feed, filters, world map, and country detail view described below, plus a short line explaining what DX chasing is for anyone meeting the term for the first time. Browse as long as you like; logging is the one thing that asks you to create an account, because a QSO needs a logbook to land in. A link to hamtrax.com/#/programs/dx/hunt opens that tab directly whether you're signed in or not.

Live DX cluster spots​

The spot list is fed by the worldwide DX cluster network (via HamQTH), refreshed automatically every few minutes just like the POTA feed. Each spot shows:

  • The DX station's callsign and frequency
  • Band and mode (when the spotter's comment identifies one)
  • Country flag and name, resolved from the spot's DXCC entity
  • Time since the spot was posted

Spots that can't be pinned to a current DXCC entity — maritime-mobile stations, deleted entities — are left out rather than shown with guessed countries. On the map, a DX spot pins at its country's position, not the station's exact address: the cluster reports who and where in the world, not a street address, so the map is a propagation picture rather than a park locator.

The Band, Mode, and Last Spotted filters work exactly as they do for POTA hunting.

New Country / Country Contacted — your standing with every spot​

Every DX row carries a country badge in its top-right corner, in the same place on every card, so you can scan the feed by badge alone:

  • New Country (blue) — this country is absent from your logbook. It's a new one.
  • Country Contacted (grey) — you've already worked this country.

That check reads your whole logbook, not just this tab — an imported contact with a DXCC field, a DX contact logged here, or a contact whose country name matches the entity list all count as contacted — so New Country marks genuinely new entities instead of nagging you about countries you've confirmed for years. A spot whose country can't be read at all gets no badge rather than a wrong one.

Browsing signed out, no row carries a badge at all. There is no logbook to measure against, and calling every country New Country would be a claim with nothing behind it. Sign in and the badges appear.

Hide my country​

DX means distant — usually, outside your own borders. The Hide my country filter (on by default) hides spots for stations located in your own country, so the feed shows only DX. Flip it off in the filters to see everything, including domestic spots. If Hamtrax doesn't know your country yet, the filter hides nothing rather than guessing.

The country detail view​

Tap a DX spot — anywhere on its row in the list, or see details on its map pin — and it opens the country, not just the station. Where POTA's detail view is built around a place you can stand in, this one is built around a country you can reach, with the spotted station as the way to reach it today.

It shows:

  • The country itself — its flag, its name, its continent, its main callsign prefix, and its official DXCC entity number
  • Photographs of the place, freely licensed from Wikimedia Commons — a full-width photo across the top of the view; when there is more than one, page through them with the arrows or dots (or swipe), each crediting its photographer with a link back to Commons
  • The station on the air — frequency and mode in the large readout, with the same band-plan warning POTA hunting shows if the frequency sits outside your licence privileges
  • The operator — their name and location when the callbooks know them; tap the callsign to open their full details without leaving the modal
  • Recent spots — every other time the cluster reported this station, newest first, with who spotted them
  • Tried, Try Later, and Contacted — the same three actions as the list row and the map pin, reading and writing the same status

Country facts​

Tap Country facts to open what Hamtrax knows about the place you just worked: its capital, when it was founded, GDP per person, its main religion, its main exports, its official languages, and its area and population. Some entities lead with a sentence of context above the cards.

Entities that aren't countries get a different set — and a differently named pill, Entity facts — because the country questions have no answer for them. Antarctica, Bouvet Island, Clipperton Island and the Canary Islands show who administers them, what they are, whether anyone lives there, when anyone last put them on the air, and why they're hard to work — which is the interesting part anyway. They never borrow their administering country's economy: the Canary Islands will never show you Spain's GDP.

Two honest notes. Facts are being added entity by entity — a country Hamtrax hasn't researched yet simply shows no facts panel, rather than a grid of blanks. And the facts themselves read in English in every language; the labels around them follow your language setting.

Countries and entities are two different things throughout, and the detail view is careful about it: the flag shown for the Canary Islands is Spain's flag, because that's the flag they fly — but everything the view says about the entity is the Canary Islands' own.

Logging a DX contact​

That detail view carries the same one-tap actions POTA hunting uses: Contacted logs the QSO with the callsign, frequency, band, mode, and country pre-filled, while Tried and Try Later track the ones that got away. DX contacts save through the same door as POTA hunts, so a cloud-rejected save announces itself the same way — see Logging a Hunt Contact. Working the same station in the same country twice in one UTC day on the same band and mode is caught as a duplicate. DX deliberately does not use POTA's once-per-UTC-day rule: DXCC credit is awarded per band and per mode, so the same country on 20m and again on 40m is two achievements and Hamtrax keeps both.

Either way, the saved contact records the country and its official ADIF entity number on the QSO itself — so it exports complete (COUNTRY and DXCC fields other logbooks and award programs read), and it shades that country on your Logbook map's visited-countries overlay. Chase a country, watch it fill in.

Worked a station the cluster never spotted? The Manually add contact card at the top of the list takes a callsign and a Country picker in place of POTA's park field — search by country name, entity number, or callsign prefix (typing 269 or SP both find Poland).

Two things from the POTA panel are deliberately absent here: there is no Spot toggle, because Hamtrax posts hunter spots to POTA.app and there is no equivalent for the DX cluster, and there is no Hunting from a park? quick start, because a country can't be activated.

Where DX contacts are filed​

Every DX contact files into a UTC-month folder listed directly on the DX Chasing card in your Logbook — "August 2026", created automatically on your first DX contact of the month. DX Chasing only hunts, so unlike Parks on the Air its card has no Hunting subheading — the months are the card. These months belong to DX Chasing alone: a DX contact can never land in a POTA month, and a POTA hunt can never land in a DX month, the same hygiene guardrails that keep every program's folders clean. The DX Chasing card itself appears in the folder tree with your first DX contact, so a POTA-only logbook stays exactly as it was. (One exception: a brand-new, empty logbook shows every installed program's card as a starting point.)

Filing is also independent of any activation: even while a POTA activation is running and your POTA hunts are filing into it as park-to-park, DX contacts keep filing into their monthly folder — a DX contact belongs to DX Chasing, not to the park session.

One save is one record — and two tabs are two records

Each tab logs under its own program, and a save never clones itself anywhere. That cuts both ways: log a station once in the DX tab and you have exactly one record — but work a POTA activator abroad and log them in both tabs, and you have two records by design. One is a POTA hunt credit for the park; the other is DX credit for the country. They are different achievements in different programs, so Hamtrax keeps them as the separate contacts they are rather than merging or blocking either.

The Logbook's DX view​

The List / Map / DX switch on every Logbook folder is the other half of the story. The DX view is a per-folder summary of the countries (and US states) the folder's contacts reached, each with its flag and contact count — dependencies and microstates included — open a DX monthly folder to see that month's entity haul, or any activation or custom folder to see how far it reached. It summarizes whatever folder you're looking at, so it has always worked on POTA folders too; DX Chasing just gives it a folder built around exactly what it measures.

  • Hunting -- The POTA side of the same panel: live park spots, filters, and hunt logging.
  • Folders & Labels -- How program cards and monthly folders organize your contacts.
  • Logbook Hygiene Rules -- The guardrails that keep DX and POTA months separate.
  • Importing Contacts -- How imported contacts reach DX monthly folders, including untagged contacts filed from their DXCC entity or COUNTRY name.
  • 2D Map -- The visited-countries overlay every DX chase shades.