so ive been doing CW for about 8 months now and i passed my extra last spring partly because i wanted to get into morse more seriously. been using a Bencher BY-1 paddle with my radio's built in keyer and honestly the sending feels pretty good most days but then other days it just feels like total mush coming out and i cant figure out if its the iambic settings or just me being tense or what.

i've been running around 18 wpm which is comfortable for receiving when the band is clean but sending i sometimes fumble and then i get in my head about it and it gets worse. is there a way to dial in the dit/dah ratio or is the built in keyer on most radios just kind of set and forget. also curious if anyone has opinions on iambic mode A vs mode B because honestly ive read explanations of both like 5 times and i still dont fully understand the practical difference in everyday use

also wondering if paddles vs a straight key would be worth trying for slower practice or if that would just confuse muscle memory at this point

the mode A vs mode B thing trips up a lot of people and honestly most folks just pick one and stick with it without really knowing why. the short version is that mode B will complete the last element you squeezed even after you let go, mode A won't. in practice if you're not doing fancy squeeze keying most of the time you probably won't notice a big difference. i run mode A and have for years just because that's what my first keyer defaulted to.

the timing thing though - a lot of built in keyers are actually pretty decent but some radios let you tweak the weight (the dit to dah ratio). check your manual and see if there's a keyer weight adjustment, sometimes its buried in the menu. 3:1 is standard but some people like it a hair heavier on the dah side, like 3.1 or 3.2, feels more solid to some folks.

and yeah try a straight key for slow practice, it wont mess up your paddle muscle memory i promise, if anything it helps you hear individual elements more clearly because you're forming them intentionally. i still bang on my old J-38 sometimes just to slow down and think about what i'm sending. nothing wrong with it.

oh man i went through exactly this when i was around the same point in my CW journey. what helped me weirdly was just recording myself with an audio recorder and listening back. you hear things you dont notice while youre sending because your brain fills in what you meant to send not what actually came out. pretty humbling but useful

also dont underestimate just being relaxed physically - i used to grip the paddle way too hard and it was making my timing all choppy. took me forever to figure out that was the problem. light touch, let the spring do the work basically