so ive been trying to get more serious about CW lately and i finally picked up a used Bencher paddle off ebay, hooked it up to my little Winkeyer USB and... i dont know, everything i send just sounds off to me. like the dits and dahs kind of run together at anything above maybe 15 wpm. i spent probably two hours last night messing with the weight and ratio settings in the software and i feel like im going in circles.

im practicing with just.learn.morse.code on my phone for receiving and thats actually going ok, im up to about 18 wpm copying but my sending is nowhere close to that. someone at my club said maybe my paddle tension is too loose and thats causing the problem but i honestly cant tell. how do you guys even know what the right tension feels like? like is there some trick to setting it up or do you just kind of figure it out over time

the tension thing is really personal and yeah it takes a while to dial in. what i always tell people is start with more tension than you think you need, like crank it up until it feels almost stiff, then back it off slowly until it feels comfortable. if its too loose your fingers tend to bounce and you get extra dits you didnt mean to send, which is probably what your mushy issue is.

also the weight setting in Winkeyer — i run mine at about 50 which is the default and honestly i never touch it. where i would look first is the ratio, some people go slightly higher than 3:1 on the dah to dit ratio and it can help things sound cleaner especially if youre still building muscle memory. but honestly the biggest thing is just slow down. set it to like 12 wpm and make yourself send clean code, sloppy fast code is so much harder to break than clean slow code on the other end.

i had almost the exact same problem when i started with my paddle, turned out one of my contacts was slightly bent so it wasnt making clean contact every time. worth just looking closely at the paddle contacts and making sure theyre parallel and gapping evenly on both sides. probably not your issue but took me forever to figure that out lol