Michelle Taylor

so ive been at this for a few weeks now and i cant figure out if its me or the keyer. im using an old bencher paddle hooked up to a MFJ keyer, the 493 i think, and most of the time it sounds decent but then ill be sending along and suddenly the dits start running together or i get an extra dah thrown in that i definitely didnt squeeze for. happens more when i try to speed up past like 18 wpm.
i went back and slowed everything down to 12 wpm and practiced a bunch and it sounds clean at that speed. so maybe its just my technique and im rushing? or could it be the keyer settings, like the dit/dah ratio or the weight adjustment? i messed with the weight a little and honestly couldnt tell much difference. would love to hear if anyone else went through this learning curve or has tips for getting past that wall where faster = sloppy

yeah that's pretty much how most people run it honestly. N1MM is just so purpose-built for contesting that trying to force Log4OM into that role doesnt really make sense, the exchange logging and rate tracking and all that just isnt the same. i've tried doing contests in other software and you end up fighting the tool instead of working the pile.
the ADIF import thing after the fact is annoying but its not that bad once you set up a filter to check for dupes before you merge. what i do is export from N1MM right after the contest ends, open it in a text editor real quick and check the header info is clean, then import into Log4OM with the duplicate detection set to strict. havent had a serious problem with it in a while. the only time it got weird for me was when i had some FT8 QSOs in Log4OM that also showed up in the contest log because i was running both modes during the same event, that confused things for a bit.

I'm kind of in the same boat, just got my license a few months ago and have been doing POTA activations with a QCX+ on 20m. the kit building part is half the fun for me, sitting there with the instructions and soldering each component in knowing exactly whats in the radio is really satisfying compared to just buying a box off the shelf.
one thing I didn't expect was how much patience CW QRP requires, like you really have to be willing to call CQ a few times and wait. but the pileups when people are hunting you for POTA are actually kind of manageable at low power which is nice, not totally overwhelmed the way i imagine ssb would be. still figuring everything out but yeah the hobby feels way more real to me operating this way than it did just scanning around on a handheld.