so ive been running Log4OM for about a year and a half now for general logging and i really like it for day to day stuff, tracking my QSOs, looking up callsigns, all that. but every time a contest rolls around everyone in the club is talking about N1MM and i feel like im the only one not using it.

the thing is i dont really want to maintain two separate logs. i know you can export and import between them but that always feels like a disaster waiting to happen, duplicate QSOs, missing fields, whatever. and then theres the whole WSJT-X situation where i have that piped into Log4OM via UDP and it actually works pretty well most of the time. not sure how that would interact if i had N1MM running at the same time or if i even could.

has anyone actually got a clean workflow going between all three of these? or do most contesters just accept that contest logs live separately and they manually merge stuff later? genuinely curious how people handle this because it seems like the kind of thing nobody talks about until you're in the middle of a contest weekend and suddenly nothing is talking to nothing.

yeah this is kind of the eternal problem with logging software honestly. i gave up trying to keep one master log a while back. for contests i run N1MM standalone, export the Cabrillo when its done, submit, and then i take the ADIF export and import it into Log4OM after the fact. yeah you have to watch for dupes but if you sort by date and do a careful merge its usually fine. N1MM and Log4OM dont really play nice sharing a live database anyway so trying to run them simultaneously is just asking for pain.

as for WSJT-X, you can only point the UDP logging at one port listener at a time without some middleware, so if N1MM is running and set up to receive from WSJT-X then Log4OM wont see those QSOs. some people use JTAlert as a middleman which can fanout to multiple loggers but ive never bothered for contest operating since i barely do FT8 in contests anyway. the post-contest ADIF import honestly takes like ten minutes once you get the hang of it, i wouldnt stress about it too much.

N1MM is really built for one thing and it does that thing incredibly well. trying to use it as your everyday logger is kind of awkward, the interface is all optimized around rapid contest exchange entry and the callsign lookup stuff isnt as fleshed out for general rag chew logging. so i get why people keep Log4OM for the day to day stuff. ive just accepted that i have a contest log and a real log and they're different things. a contest QSO is barely even a QSO in the traditional sense, its like 15 seconds of exchange and move on, so treating it differently doesnt bother me anymore.