so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and cant really make up my mind. currently using WSJT-X for all my FT8 stuff which obviously has its own built in log but its pretty bare bones and i want something that ties everything together. i do maybe 2 or 3 contests a year, nothing serious, just the occasional state QSO party and maybe ARRL DX if im feeling motivated. the rest of the time its just casual HF operating, some digital, some SSB.

a buddy at the club keeps telling me just run N1MM for everything because its so good for contests but honestly the interface feels like it was designed in 2003 and never touched again. i know thats kind of unfair and it obviously works great but im not sure i want to stare at that thing every time i sit down for a normal ragchew session. Log4OM looks a lot more polished and supposedly integrates with WSJT-X decently but ive never actually used it in a contest and i dont know if its going to feel clunky compared to N1MM when i actually need to move fast.

does anyone actually switch between the two depending on what theyre doing or is that just asking for trouble with duplicate log entries and all that. or is there some workflow im not thinking of that makes this less of a headache than it sounds

yeah this is basically the same situation i was in about two years ago. what i ended up doing is running Log4OM as my main everyday logger and only firing up N1MM when im actually in a contest. the trick is you have to be disciplined about exporting your ADIF out of N1MM after the contest and importing it into Log4OM before you do anything else, otherwise you will absolutely end up with missing contacts or dupes when you go to upload to LoTW or whatever. its a little annoying but honestly once you do it a couple times it becomes second nature and takes like 3 minutes.

the WSJT-X integration with Log4OM is pretty solid, you just point WSJT-X at the UDP port Log4OM is listening on and contacts log automatically. only issue ive had is occasionally it misses one if WSJT-X is being weird but that doesnt happen often. N1MM for contests though, i wouldnt trade it, the bandmap and the way it handles multipliers once you get used to it is just faster than anything else ive tried for that purpose.

honestly i just use N1MM for everything and stopped fighting it. the interface does look old but after a few weeks you stop noticing and the thing just works. the WSJT-X logging via UDP works fine with it too, i had it set up in maybe 20 minutes following the instructions on the N1MM wiki. for casual operating it's not as pretty as Log4OM but i dunno, i kind of like having one log and not worrying about syncing stuff between two programs.