[WriteLog] Troubling info

[Larry Schimelpfenig]

I've been a Writelog user from home and from NR4M in M/? contests for many 
years. I loved it at home, but as we started getting things together from 
the new NR4M site I got to hating it because of networking problems.

I had tried N1MM but as Duck (K8DD) said, I didn't like the feel of it. I 
set it up between three computers at home to get a feel for the difficulty 
in setting it up. While I had it working well, I didn't like the idea of 
spending a lot of time learning the set-up so I'd be as comfortable as I was 
with WL. A few of the guys used MM at home and favored it, but not everyone.

After K3LR reported excellent results with it in his M/M operations, I 
downloaded the Win Test demo and liked it enough that I ordered a full 
featured copy. NR4M did as well. I found that it felt quite a bit like WL. 
That was because it's really a Windows based CT and we use WL with the CT 
emulation. Prior to going to WL we used NA which is also very much akin to 
CT. We used Win Test in a few contests from the farm. I liked it, but some 
of the other ops weren't crazy about learning the necessary nuances of it. 
The networking was solid!

Then Wayne announced that he had done some work with the networking in WL to 
resolve many of the problems we had experienced. So the next contest was 
done with WL and we haven't turned back.

I certainly understand Bill's concern with service and while if one looks in 
enough places most of what one needs to know is documented, but it's not 
handy and is time consuming.

I found a few features in Win Test that I liked better than WL and in some 
contests from home I'll use WT. The down-side is the lack of contests 
supported by the product.

As Writelog sits right now it supports the radios we're using and if they 
decided to fold shop we'd be ok for a while. I hope those that left it 
because of the networking issues understand that in that regard it's now a 
much improved product.

Finally someone made the comment that they'd be interesting to see 
statistics on the logging software used for other contests. I'd be 
interested in seeing that as well.

73 de Larry K7SV