Contesting is the best part of the hobby — and the software is where most newcomers give up. The powerful loggers are built for experts, so a lot of people fall back to their everyday logger during a contest and miss out on the spotting, dupe-checking, and live scoring that make it fun. TR4W takes the other road: you make the contacts, it handles the rest.
"We're the computer.
You just operate."
That single idea drives every design decision in TR4W. The fiddly parts of contesting — keying CW, wrangling digital modes, remembering which field goes where — are the computer's job, not yours. Your job is to find the next station and work it.
Type the callsign, press Enter. Type the exchange — in whatever order it comes — into a single field, press Enter. TR4W figures out what's what. No tab dance, no hunting for the right window.
CW-by-CAT turns the plain text in your macros into the right keying for your radio — no external keyer box, no cryptic codes to memorize. The thing that scares people away from CW contesting simply isn't there.
Keep using the WSJT-X you already run — no special setup. TR4W rides along quietly, highlights the calls and multipliers you need right inside the WSJT-X window, and plays nicely with GridTracker and JT-Alert.
Many modern radios — IC-705, IC-7300, K4, TS-890 and more — connect straight over Ethernet or Wi-Fi. No extra interface box. And HamLib covers 200+ radios besides.
Coming from Parks on the Air? TR4W speaks your language: park lookup on entry, Park-to-Park, Pass-the-Mic, and N-fer activations that log a separate QSO per park automatically.
No license fee, no black box. The full source lives on GitHub — community-hosted, community-built. Installers ship with VirusTotal scans so you can install with confidence.
Simple doesn't mean stripped-down. All the things you expect from a serious contest logger are here; TR4W's job is just to make them effortless.
Point TR4W at your radio — over the network for many modern rigs, or via HamLib. Pick the contest from the list and you're set up.
Call CQ or search and pounce. Type calls and exchanges naturally; TR4W keys the CW, sends the macros, and tracks dupes and multipliers as you go.
Watch your score climb in real time, then export a clean Cabrillo file for the contest sponsor. That's it — you contested.