Sarah Moore

the wall you're hitting around 10-12wpm is pretty much universal, almost everyone goes through it. what happens is below that speed your brain is still sounding out dit-dah patterns consciously, and to break through you have to get to where you hear the whole character as one sound, like how you hear a word without thinking about individual letters. it clicks eventually but you cant really force it.
head copy is actually the key, your elmer is right even if it sounds scary. start small, just try to copy one word in your head before writing it. then two words. you dont have to copy everything, just practice trusting yourself to let a character go if you miss it and keep moving. the missing and moving on thing is honestly the biggest skill in high speed copy, nobody gets every single character.
took me about 8 months to get comfortable at 20wpm but i wasnt practicing every day. your pace sounds good. also try listening to actual QSOs on the air even if you can barely copy them, something about real morse with real people sending it just differently than computer generated stuff and it helps your ear adjust

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just recently started getting into DX chasing which is way more fun than i expected honestly. someone at my club mentioned using DXwatch and the cluster spotting on QRZ together and i kind of just fumbled my way through setting it up but i feel like im missing something.
right now what i do is have DXwatch open on one tab and ill look at spots coming in, then if i see something interesting ill flip over to QRZ to look up the callsign and see what country or entity its from, then try to tune to the listed frequency. sometimes by the time i get there the signal is gone or the pileup is so massive i cant get through anyway. is there a better workflow people use? like is there an app that kind of combines all this into one place or do most people just juggle tabs. also not sure if im filtering DXwatch correctly, right now im just looking at everything which is kind of overwhelming on a busy day.
running a modest setup, IC-7300 and a wire antenna in the backyard, so im not exactly breaking through huge pileups but i have managed a few nice contacts this way already so it seems to be working somewhat.

honestly for where you're at i'd hold off on SO2R for now, not because it's not worth it eventually but because the cognitive load is real and if your single radio technique isnt already pretty dialed in you'll just end up doing two things mediocrely instead of one thing well. the rate improvement is legit when it clicks but ive seen guys jump into it and their scores actually drop the first couple seasons because theyre fighting the setup instead of operating.
the thing that made the biggest difference for me before i went SO2R was getting really disciplined about when to switch modes, like i used to run until the rate dropped below like 60/hr and then finally go S&P but i was being too conservative. started setting a harder threshold and actually tracking it with a rate window in n1mm and that alone bumped my scores noticeably. also band change timing in a multi-band contest is huge and most people just wing it based on feel when you should really know your propagation well enough to have a rough plan going in

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep hearing people on HF use all these abbreviations and codes and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. like i know QSL is for confirming contact and QTH is your location but thats about it. someone said QRM to me the other day and i just kind of said yeah and moved on hoping they wouldnt notice i had no clue what they were talking about.
is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time? also whats the difference between Q codes and just regular ham abbreviations because i see stuff like 73 and 88 which dont start with Q but seem to mean something specific too. feels like theres a whole second language i missed out on when i got my license

yeah totally, i do that more than i probably should. sometimes i'll just park on 17m for like an hour while im doing other stuff around the shack. its almost like background noise but then you catch something interesting and suddenly youre paying attention again. nothing wrong with it, radio doesnt always have to be about making contacts i think

happens to everyone dont worry about it. when you double with someone just stop transmitting and wait for net control to sort it out. they'll usually ask for the stations to try again one at a time. you did the right thing by backing off. most net controls are pretty patient with new folks anyway

Are you using the "Ignore DC spike" option in GQRX? Also try adjusting the RF gain to around 30-40 dB instead of max - sometimes AGC causes more DC offset issues with the newer dongles.