so ive been trying to get back into CW after a long break and honestly my sending is just embarassing right now. im using an old Bencher BY-1 paddle that i dug out of storage, hooked up to my K3, and the iambic keyer in the rig. the spacing between elements just feels... off? like my dits and dahs are running together sometimes and other times there's too much space. i know part of it is my fist being rusty but i'm also wondering if i have the weight and tension on the paddle adjusted wrong. been playing with the gap between the contacts but cant really tell if im making it better or worse.

also i read somewhere that iambic mode B vs mode A makes a difference and i honestly dont remember which one i used to use. does that actually matter for someone who's just trying to get back up to maybe 15-20 wpm eventually? i feel like i'm overthinking all of this when i should just be practicing but the timing thing is genuinely bugging me.

the mode A vs mode B thing does matter but honestly for getting back up to speed it probably isnt your main problem. most people who learned on one mode get confused when they switch, so if you dont remember what you used before just pick one and stick with it. i run mode A and never looked back.

for the paddle adjustment, the gap thing is huge. you want the contacts close enough that a light touch closes them but not so close that any little vibration sets them off. theres no magic number, you kind of have to feel it out. what i do is set the tension pretty light, maybe lighter than feels natural at first, and then practice really slow. like painfully slow, 8 or 10 wpm slow. sending clean characters at low speed before trying to push the rate up is the only thing that actually worked for me when i came back after a couple years away. the muscle memory comes back faster than you'd think once you stop fighting the keyer.

also check that your keyer speed on the K3 matches what you think it is. sometimes those settings get bumped.

i had almost the exact same problem last year when i finally started taking CW seriously. what helped me weirdly was just listening to a lot of code, not even trying to copy it perfectly, just putting on W1AW code practice or one of those apps while i was doing something else around the shack. after a few weeks my ear got calibrated again and then when i sat down to send i could kind of hear when my own spacing was wrong.

the Bencher BY-1 is a solid paddle btw, definitely not the problem. those things last forever.