so ive been trying to get serious about CW for about 3 months now and im finally at the point where im not embarrassed to get on the air but my paddle is driving me nuts. its a cheap chinese dual-lever paddle i picked up on ebay and the keyer is built into my IC-7300. the problem is i keep getting these extra dits squeezed in at the end of characters especially when im sending something like a K or an N, like the contact will end and theres just this little stray dit tacked on. i dont know if its my technique or the paddle tension or what.

ive messed with the keyer speed (running about 18 wpm right now) and tried adjusting the weight ratio a little but nothing seems to fix it. someone at the club told me it might be a squeeze keyer issue and to try iambic mode B instead of mode A but honestly i dont totally understand the difference and i fumbled around in the menus for a while without figuring out what was actually changing.

anyone dealt with this? is this just a learning curve thing or is the cheap paddle probably the culprit here

yeah that stray dit thing is super common when youre learning paddles and honestly it took me probably a year before it mostly went away. a big part of it is just releasing the dit paddle a tiny bit late — your thumb is still holding slight pressure when the keyer is still listening. the iambic mode A vs B thing does matter but its subtle, mode B will send one more element if you release both paddles at the same time which can actually make this worse for some people, so try switching to mode A if youre on B right now.

also with cheap paddles the contact gap adjustment is really important, if the contacts are too close even a tiny finger tremor closes the circuit. theres usually a small setscrew on each paddle arm. try opening the gap up just a hair more than you think you need and see if that helps. i went through two or three budget paddles before i understood that half my bad sending was the paddle and half was me, hard to tell which is which sometimes.

im in basically the same boat lol, 4 months in and my CW is still pretty rough around the edges. one thing that actually helped me was slowing way down with the Koch method trainer and really focusing on clean release rather than clean press if that makes sense. like i was so worried about hitting the right paddle that i wasnt thinking about when i let go. anyway not sure if that helps but just throwing it out there