so ive been trying to get back into CW after a long break, probably 15 years off, and something is just not clicking. im using an old Bencher paddle into a Winkeyer USB and the dits and dahs just sound... off? like mushy or uneven. i know my fist was never great but this feels mechanical, not like a me problem.

i've messed with the weight setting in the Winkeyer software a little but honestly i dont fully understand what that does. like does increasing weight make the dits longer or does it affect the spaces, i genuinely cant tell by ear. ive been practicing at around 15 wpm but maybe i should slow way down and rebuild from scratch. anyone else come back to CW after a long break and had to basically relearn everything?

the weight adjustment in Winkeyer adds or subtracts time from the dit length which then kind of cascades and affects everything else perceptually. default is 50 and i'd honestly just put it back there if you've been tweaking it and leave it alone until you actually know what you're listening for. the mushy sound might also just be your paddle tension and gap — Bencher paddles can drift over time, the tension springs get lazy. worth checking the gap on both sides with a business card or something similar, you want it consistent left and right.

and yeah coming back after that long a break is rough. i did it after about 8 years and it took me probably 3 months of daily practice before i stopped feeling like a total lid. the muscle memory is still in there somewhere, it just takes a while to surface again.

i had the same thing happen when i first got my Winkeyer, kept messing with settings and made it worse lol. what helped me was just running it completely stock and recording myself on audacity to actually see the waveform. seeing that my dits were inconsistent lengths was way more useful than trying to hear it in real time. also 15 wpm might actually be a weird middle speed — some people find it easier to practice at like 20 wpm character speed with extra spacing between characters (the koch method thing) rather than just slowing everything down uniformly.