so i passed my general about a year ago and ive been slowly working on CW ever since. started at 5wpm with the Koch method and honestly that part went pretty smoothly, was actually having fun with it. but somewhere around 13wpm i just hit this wall and i cant seem to break through no matter what i do.

im practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day with the G4FON trainer and i can copy most letters fine when im relaxed but the second i feel any pressure or try to push the speed up even a little bit i just fall apart and start missing stuff. feels like my brain just cant keep up and then i panic and miss even more. its a really frustrating cycle honestly.

anybody been through this? how did you actually get from like 13 to 20wpm? im starting to wonder if theres something fundamentally wrong with how im approaching this or if its just one of those things that takes way longer than people say it does

oh man yeah i remember that wall very well. 13wpm is almost like a psychological checkpoint as much as anything else. what worked for me was two things and i know everyone says different stuff but hear me out.

first i stopped trying to copy every single character. like i was treating it as a test where i had to get 100% and the moment i missed something i'd get flustered. once i started just letting the missed ones go and staying in the flow it got way better. your brain needs to learn to keep moving, not stop and panic every time you dont catch something.

second thing is i started listening to actual QSOs on 40m even when i couldnt copy most of it. just having real code in my ears every day, call signs, RST reports, the rhythm of a real exchange, it kind of wired things together in a way that the training software alone wasnt doing for me. took a few weeks but i noticed i started hearing words instead of letters somewhere in there and that was kind of the turning point. you're not doing anything wrong, its just one of those plateaus, everybody hits it around there

im in basically the same boat so ill be watching this thread lol. currently at like 11wpm and just downloaded the lcwo.net thing which seems pretty good. somebody told me to try setting the character speed higher than the overall speed, like 20wpm characters at 13wpm effective or whatever they call it, farnsworth spacing i think? havent tried it long enough to know if it actually helps but maybe worth looking into if you havent already