so ive been at this for about 3 months now and im really trying to get my CW up to a usable speed but something just feels off with my sending. im using an old Bencher BY-1 paddle that i picked up at a hamfest and a Winkeyer USB and honestly i thought that combo would be good but every time i listen back to recordings of myself i sound like im sending mush. the dits and dahs dont have that crisp clean sound i hear from the good operators on 40m.

ive been messing with the weight and ratio settings in the Winkeyer software and i think maybe i made it worse actually. not sure if its the paddle tension or my technique or what. my elmer told me to just slow down and really nail each character before i try to go faster but at 10 wpm i feel like im dragging and it tempts me to speed up before im ready

anyone been through this? is there a good starting point for the keyer settings or is this just a practice problem i need to grind through

yeah this sounds really familiar, went through the exact same thing when i first got my Bencher. honestly the first thing id check is your paddle tension and gap — if the gap between the paddle and the contact is too wide youre probably squeezing harder than you need to and that throws your timing off without you even realizing it. try tightening it so theres almost no gap, just a hair, and see if that helps you relax your grip a bit.

for the Winkeyer i'd actually reset it to defaults before messing with weight ratios. the default 50/50 weight is a good baseline and you can drift into trouble real fast tweaking those numbers when you dont really know what direction youre going. and your elmer is right about the speed thing — i know it feels painfully slow but 10 wpm done clean sounds SO much better than 15 wpm mush. copying yourself back is the right instinct too, most people never do that and they wonder why nobody can read them

i'm kind of in the same boat so not sure i can help much but one thing that actually made a difference for me was doing the Koch method with LCWO dot com instead of just trying to ragchew before i was ready. also someone on here mentioned recording yourself and comparing to a really clean sender, i started listening to W1AW practice transmissions and just trying to match that rhythm and it helped my ear more than anything