Patricia Kim

im in basically the same boat as you, been working on CW for about 4 months now. what i ended up doing was getting one of those cheap GHD paddles off amazon just to have something physical to practice with and honestly its been fine. nothing fancy but it works and the adjustments stay put which was my main concern with cheap stuff. one thing that really helped me that nobody told me upfront — dont just practice the letters in isolation, start copying actual QSOs as soon as you can even if you only get like half the words. theres a site called RufzXP and also just tuning around 40m around 7.050 or so and trying to copy real traffic made a huge difference for me compared to only doing drills. your brain starts to hear whole words instead of individual dits and dahs and it clicks eventually

this is something i struggled with for a long time too. one thing that helped me was actually watching some of the DXpedition operator videos on youtube where they film the operating position during a big pileup. you can kinda hear what they're hearing and it gives you a sense of what cuts through vs what just adds to the noise. some of those ops are working like 4-5 stations a minute which is impressive but also means your window is tiny if your call doesnt pop out immedietly. i also read somewhere that sending your suffix only if the DX is clearly working through partials can help, like if he says "station ending in uniform november" dont send your whole call again just send the UN part. seems like common sense but i used to just blast my whole callsign every time regardless of what he was doing

yeah that's pretty much exactly what i do — N1MM for contests, Log4OM for everything else. its a bit clunky to keep two programs installed but honestly once you get used to it the workflow isnt bad. after a contest i just export the Cabrillo and the ADIF from N1MM and import the ADIF into Log4OM to keep the master log updated. takes maybe five minutes. the WSJT-X duplicate thing is a known annoyance. i think what happens is if WSJT-X logs the QSO and then you also manually confirm something in Log4OM you get two entries. i turned off the auto-log in WSJT-X and just let Log4OM handle it through the UDP port, that cut down on most of the dupes. not perfect but better.