so ive been working on my CW for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months felt great, went from barely copying callsigns to getting whole QSOs at 5 then 8 then 10wpm without much trouble. but now im kind of stuck in this weird plateau around 12-13wpm and it feels like no matter how much i practice i cant seem to break through to the next level. im using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and i do maybe 20-30 minutes a day most days, sometimes i miss a day here and there.

the thing that gets me is individual characters i know cold, like i can copy most letters and numbers fine when theyre sent slowly, but when the speed goes up my brain just kind of locks up and i start missing things and then i panic and miss more and it kind of snowballs. someone at my club said i need to just listen to actual QSOs on the air instead of trainer software, is that true? or should i stick with the software until i get to at least 15? im not sure what the right approach is here and would love to hear from people who have been through this.

the plateau around 12-13 is super common, almost everyone hits it, so dont get discouraged. what you're describing with the panic spiral is totally normal too — you miss one character, your brain tries to figure out what it was, and by then youve missed three more. the fix for that is honestly just learning to let characters go. seriously, if you miss one just move on. your brain will fill in a lot from context once you get used to doing that.

the other thing I'd suggest is bump your training speed up higher than you want to copy, like set it to 18 or 20wpm even if you can only get maybe half of it. this is the Farnsworth trick but in reverse kind of — train your ear to hear the characters at high speed even if you cant copy full text yet. after a few weeks of that, 15wpm starts to feel slow. also yeah get on the air, even just to listen. W1AW sends code practice at multiple speeds and thats free, i used that a lot around where you are.

honestly i went through almost the exact same thing last year, stuck at like 13 for what felt like forever. what finally clicked for me was switching away from the software for a while and just copying real QSOs off the air. not even trying to make contacts yet, just tuning around 40m in the evenings and copying whatever i could catch. it felt harder at first because real operators arent perfectly spaced like the software is but something about it being real made my brain pay attention differently i dont know how to explain it. took maybe another month or two but i did eventually get comfortable at 15 and now im working up toward 20. still not there but its coming.