so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and honestly i really like it for day to day stuff, the QSL tracking and award chasing features are great and it syncs nicely with WSJT-X through the UDP port which was kind of a pain to set up at first but once it clicked its been solid.

but contest season is coming up and everybody keeps telling me N1MM is basically the only real option if you take contests seriously at all. i tried running N1MM last year for the CQWW and yeah it's clearly built for that kind of operating, the SO2R stuff and the bandmap integration are on another level compared to trying to do a contest from Log4OM. but then i end up with logs split across two programs and merging them back into Log4OM afterward is always kind of a mess, adif import works but there's always something weird with the dupes or a few records that come in wrong.

anyone settled on a clean workflow for this? like do you just accept that contest logs live in N1MM and your main log lives in Log4OM and you do a periodic import, or is there a better way to keep everything in sync. also curious if anyone is running WSJT-X feeding into N1MM during a contest — does that even make sense or do you basically stop doing FT8 contacts during a contest and just focus on phone/CW.

yeah i just accept the split honestly. N1MM is just too good at what it does for contesting to give it up and Log4OM is too good for everyday stuff to abandon that either. what i do is wait until a week or so after the contest, export the final N1MM log as adif, clean it up real quick in a text editor if anything looks janky, and then import into Log4OM. most of the time it goes fine. occasionally it'll do something weird with the RST fields or the contest exchange gets stuffed somewhere odd but nothing that takes more than a few minutes to fix.

as for WSJT-X during a contest, i dont really bother. if its a contest that has an FT8 category or explicitly allows digital modes then maybe, but for something like CQWW i just leave WSJT-X closed and work the pile ups the old fashioned way. trying to have N1MM and WSJT-X both talking to the radio at the same time during a contest sounds like a recipe for a bad time to me.

the WSJT-X to N1MM thing actually does work during contests like FD where digital counts, theres a mode in N1MM where it can accept the contacts from WSJT-X via the UDP listener, same basic idea as Log4OM does it. i set it up for field day last year and it was mostly fine though i had one weird stretch where contacts were duplicating and i couldnt figure out if it was a timing issue or what. ended up just manually logging the FT8 stuff in N1MM directly which defeated the purpose but whatever.

for the merge question, same boat as you, i've never found a perfect solution. i looked at using cloudlog as a middle layer that everything feeds into but that felt like adding even more complexity. at some point you kind of just accept that ham radio logging software in general is kind of a patchwork situation and nothing talks to everything else perfectly.