contesting

Modern computer-based contest loggers not only help you prepare a Cabrillo log for submission to a contest sponsor, but also offer tools for optimizing your performance, score, and fun. This month we’ll look at recent trends in contest logger usage by diving into the loggers used by hams in the world’s two largest contests, the CQ Worldwide CW and SSB DX contests.

Public logs for CQWW CW and SSB are online at the “Public Logs” link under the “Logs” tab at <https://cqww.com>. I analyzed the “CREATED-BY:” field in the Cabrillo headers of each of these logs and arrived at the statistics shown in Figure 1 (spanning 2005-2021) and Table 1 (world and per-continent breakdowns for 2021 entries).

In 2005 — at the left edge of Figure 1 — two of the earliest MS-DOS based contest loggers were still in wide use: CT Logger by Ken Wolff, K1EA, and the TR Logger by Larry “Tree” Tyree, N6TR. The MS-DOS versions of these programs are still in use by some contesters, but at a level much less than 1%, and thus are not listed in Table 1. Let’s work our way through Table 1 and discuss each of the loggers, starting with the most widely used.

N1MM

Tom Wagner, N1MM, began development of his logging software in 2000. In 2005, where begins, N1MM was already the world’s most popular logger. For the past two decades, a team of experienced contesters and software developers from around the world have contributed to the N1MM Logger’s software development, and a major release of design modernizations in 2013 was reflected in a name change to “N1MM+”. In 2021 N1MM represented 52% of CQWW submissions, 10 times more popular than any of its numerous competitors.