so ive been at this for about 8 months now. started completely from scratch back in the spring and honestly 5wpm felt impossible at first but i got through it using the Koch method and just grinding through the LCWO website every morning before work. got up to about 10-12wpm and felt pretty good about myself.

then somewhere around 13wpm things just... stopped. i can copy maybe 70% of what im hearing but then i get behind on a character and it all falls apart. its like my brain just cant keep up and once i miss one letter i panic and miss the next three trying to figure out what the first one was. does this happen to everyone or am i doing something wrong here

im trying to get to 20wpm because i really want to actually get on the air and have a real CW QSO, not just the painfully slow ones where both ops are clearly suffering through it. any tips from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated. been a tech for two years and just got my general last month so im motivated to actually use HF properly

oh man yes that 13wpm wall is absolutely real, i think almost everybody hits it. what youre describing with the cascade panic thing is basically your brain still trying to process letters one dit and dah at a time instead of hearing the whole character as a sound. the fix that worked for me was bumping the character speed way up even if i had to slow the overall speed down. like set your characters to 20wpm but drop the farnsworth spacing way out so you have more time between each one. that way your brain starts learning what a 20wpm character actually sounds like even if the overall pace is slow. i used that approach for about two months and when i finally tightened the spacing up it wasnt nearly as jarring.

also and i cant stress this enough -- just get on the air. even if youre slow. find somebody calling CQ at around 12-15wpm and just try it. the real QSO pressure is different from practice in a way thats hard to explain but it forces your brain to commit to answers instead of second-guessing. i made my first CW contact at like 11wpm and the other guy was super patient, most cw ops are honestly. good luck with it

the farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned is what did it for me too. also i started listening to W1AW code practice on shortwave which sounds old fashioned but theres something about copying real transmitted morse versus computer generated stuff that felt different to me, maybe its the slight qsb or just the psychological thing of knowing its coming over the air. either way it helped.

one other thing -- i stopped writing every letter down and started just listening for whole words. that was a big mental shift. like instead of c-o-p-y-i-n-g out each character i just tried to hear RST or the callsign as a whole chunk. took a while but once it clicked it really clicked