so ive been running N1MM for contests for a few years now and it does what it does really well, no complaints there. but for everyday logging i always felt like it was kind of overkill and the interface is just... a lot. ive been messing around with Log4OM lately and honestly kind of like it for general shack use, the awards tracking and QSL management stuff is way better than anything ive tried before.

the thing i cant figure out is a clean workflow when i also want to run WSJT-X on the side. right now i have WSJT-X logging to Log4OM over UDP which mostly works, but then when i switch over to a contest weekend i fire up N1MM and everything kind of falls apart because im basically maintaining two logs and manually merging stuff after the fact which is a nightmare. i know you can pipe WSJT-X to N1MM directly too but then my Log4OM is out of sync.

has anyone actually solved this or is the answer just pick one and live with it. feels like there should be a cleaner way to handle the UDP broadcasts to multiple apps at the same time but i havent dug into that deeply yet.

yeah the UDP thing can actually work to multiple listeners at the same time, WSJT-X sends to a multicast address by default i think, or you can configure it to broadcast. i run a little utility called JTAlert in the middle which picks up the WSJT-X traffic and can forward it on. not a perfect solution but it helped me keep HRDLogbook and N1MM both getting fed during a contest without me doing anything manual.

that said i basically gave up trying to keep a single master log across both apps during a contest weekend. what i do now is just let N1MM own the contest completely, then after the contest ends i export the Cabrillo, run it through a converter, and import the QSOs into Log4OM as a batch. takes maybe ten minutes and then everything is in sync. not elegant but it works and i dont lose my mind during the actual operating.

i had almost the exact same headache last winter during ARRL 10m. ended up just disabling the Log4OM UDP listener for the contest weekend so N1MM got everything clean, then did the manual import after. it sucked but at least i wasnt getting duplicate QSOs showing up everywhere. the merge problem is real and i dont think any of these apps were really designed to cooperate that nicely with each other, they all kind of want to be the master log.