so ive been using N1MM pretty much exclusively for the past few years mostly because thats what everyone at the club uses and it made sense to just go with what people could help me with. works fine for contests obviously, its basically the gold standard for that, but outside of contest weekends its kind of clunky for just day to day logging. like i'll work a station on 40m CW and i have to do all this extra stuff to get it logging properly outside of a contest context, or maybe im just not setting it up right.

anyway someone mentioned Log4OM at the last club meeting and i downloaded it and messed around with it for a few hours. the interface is way more friendly for general logging, clublog integration seems solid, and the QRZ lookups work great. but i'm worried about giving up N1MM for contests because i dont want to lose all that functionality. does anyone run both? like use Log4OM day to day and then fire up N1MM just for contest weekends? does that get messy with the ADIF imports or do dupes become a problem going back and forth

also i run WSJT-X for FT8 and right now its logging directly to N1MM via the UDP port thing which works fine. not sure how Log4OM handles that or if it even does. would appreciate any thoughts from people who actually run this kind of hybrid setup

yeah i run basically exactly that setup, N1MM for contests and Log4OM for everything else. been doing it probably 18 months or so. the ADIF import/export works fine honestly, i just make sure to export from Log4OM before a contest weekend and import into N1MM so the dupe checking is current. after the contest i export the N1MM log and pull it back into Log4OM. takes maybe 5 minutes and ive never had a serious problem with duplicate QSOs showing up. you do need to pay attention to the date/time fields because i had one weird thing early on where a few QSOs got the wrong timezone but thats a Log4OM settings thing and once you fix it its fine.

the WSJT-X integration with Log4OM is actually pretty decent now, it wasnt great a couple versions back but they fixed a lot of it. you can point the UDP logging at Log4OM the same way you do with N1MM, just change the port in WSJT-X settings and set Log4OM to listen on that port. only thing is you cant run both at the same time listening on the same port obviously so on contest weekends when im using N1MM i just switch the WSJT-X UDP back. not a big deal.

I'll add that Log4OM has gotten a lot better lately but if you're doing serious contesting N1MM is still kind of irreplaceable, the SO2R stuff and the bandmap integration and all the macro keying features just dont exist in Log4OM at the same level. for casual operating though Log4OM is genuinely nicer to use day to day, the statistics and award tracking are good and the UI doesnt feel like it was designed in 2003 (no offense to the N1MM devs, it does what it does very well).

one thing worth mentioning is that if you're active on FT8 a lot, WSJT-X logging to an external logger has always been a little quirky regardless of which one you use. i'd test it thoroughly before you rely on it, make sure the band and mode are coming through correctly and that the signal reports arent getting garbled. had an issue once where all my FT8 QSOs were logging with the wrong mode string and didnt realize for like two weeks.