[UK-CONTEST] Contest logger comparisons

[Clive Whelan]

Everyone has their favourite loggers, and I am no exception. I have at 
one time or another held subscripitions to all the major loggers, with 
the exception of CT which I thought was quite unsuitable for  a CW 
operator, chiefly because I could never find a way to send leading 
zeroes in serial numbers.

I was initially an SD user, but found my natural home when I discovered 
TRlog in about 1995 or so. Sadly with the advent of Win XP I was 
effectively forced onto Writelog which was competent but perennially 
lacked ESM in S&P mode, indeed does to this day. I was aware of N1MM at 
this point but considered it way underdeveloped. That changed fairly 
quickly and became my mainstay. I had flirted with Wintest, but 
continually broken promises of ESM prevented me going that way. When v5 
introduced that featuer I bought a sub. and used it extensively, despite 
hating the CT type interface. However it seemed replete with bugs about 
which the authors seemed to be in denial and overly defensive about. 
Thus it was back to N1MM which whilst not perfect is closest to my own 
style.

However, I am concerned because whilst Writelog and Wintest are written 
in C++, N1MM is coded in Visual Basic. Despite what some geeks may tell 
you this is not an issue for the end user and is quite transparent. 
However, for the future it may well be of concern, becaue VB will not be 
supported for ever by M$ , and at some point will be rendered useless in 
the same way as TR was, when Tree was unable to port the prog. from 
Pascal to a more modern Windows supported language. I hope this point is 
not reached too soon, but it is surely a matter of when and not if. One 
can only hope that Wintest will eliminate the idiosyncratic " features " 
discussed and also ditch the jaded CT style interface. I confess I am 
not sanguine about this prospect.

There is another faint possibility, and that is a version of TR ported 
to the Linux platform by Martin/OK1RR and friends. It is indeed only the 
non availability of a good Linux contest logger that keeps me using the 
execrable Windows platform.


73


Clive
GW3NJW