Saturday afternoon found me trolling the 20 meter band looking for whatever might be biting. The analogy between fishing and DXing never fails to generate comparisons. Band conditions weren’t great and I knew right away the pickings would be slim. I heard several domestic events underway and decided to wade in as it’s always good to hear CW activity on the bands.

Among other things, I made four CW contacts, all on 20, with Canadian stations working the Canadian Prairies QSO Party. I wouldn’t normally submit a log for such a measly performance, but I know organizers work hard on these events and I wanted to be courteous and support their efforts. After all, next year I might actually plan to be in that contest (instead of stumbling in) and I think helping perpetuate it is a good thing. But here’s the rub; it requires a Cabrillo formatted entry and my primary logger is MacLoggerDX with only ADIF output.

I’ve been down this road many times and this is where I usually terminate the process and don’t submit a log. There are online file converters and all manner of different methods for achieving a Cabrillo file formatted log entry, but none of them work — for me. I futz around with them and get something that looks like a properly formatted file that’s always rejected for multiple errors I don’t understand and my belief is: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it”.

Actually, W.C. Fields said that first, but the man makes a good point.

N1MM+ has always been a tough nut for me to crack. First off, it does everything. Literally everything. I’m certain there is some macro or .ini configuration that would cause it to flush the toilet for you. Imagine for a moment you walk into a notable hardware store where they are selling the Ultimate DooDad, the one tool that does everything from clearing your drain pipes to mowing your lawn, to trimming your trees. ALL in one single tool. It’s the weirdest looking amalgamation of disparate components forced into a single tool you’ve ever seen.

That’s N1MM+ in a nutshell. Naturally, it only runs on Windows…

But my problem (this time) wasn’t setting it up or getting it to communicate with my transceiver, that work had already been done. This time I needed a newer version than I had installed on my old ThinkPad laptop. Should be easy enough, right? I visit Google and type in, “where can I find the latest version of N1MM+ logger?” and was presented with thousands of links, all to really old versions of the program. It took me more than an hour to find the latest version online.

Once I found it, updating was a cinch and within minutes I was submitting my paltry log to the Canadian Prairies QSO Party. And hopefully, I will now be able to use N1MM+ for all my contest logging // I’m not holding my breath // but now I’m at least prepared for the 2027 CPQP.