so ive been at this morse code thing for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started out using the ARRL code course tapes (yeah i know, old school) and got up to 5wpm pretty comfortably but then just kind of plateaued. tried bumping up the speed and my brain just turns to mush past maybe 7 or 8wpm.

a buddy at the club told me to look into the Koch method and i did mess around with it a little using lcwo.net but i wasnt super consistent with it. some weeks id practice every day and other weeks life just got in the way and id miss like 10 days straight and feel like i lost everything i gained.

anyway im wondering what actually worked for people who made it through that wall. did you just grind it out with code groups or did you switch to copying real QSOs off the air or what. ive heard some folks say dont ever practice below your target speed but honestly at 20wpm i cant copy a single letter so that seems a little extreme. just looking for what real people actually did, not the textbook answer

the Farnsworth method is what got me through that exact same wall. so what you do is you set the character speed high - like 15 or even 20wpm - but put extra space between the letters so your overall word speed is lower. that way your brain learns what the actual characters sound like at speed instead of getting used to the slow dit-dah-dit patterns that you then have to unlearn later. lcwo lets you set both speeds separately which is handy.

honestly the biggest thing for me though was just copying real stuff off the air even when i could barely get 30% of it. something about knowing theres a real person sending just... clicks differently than a computer generated practice file. i used to tune around 7.050 or so in the evenings and just try to pull out callsigns. even getting one or two letters felt like a win after a while. took me about a year to feel comfortable around 15wpm and another 6 months to push it to 20. dont rush it, youll get there

just started working on this myself so cant speak to 20wpm yet but one thing that helped me a ton was the Just Learn Morse Code software - you can set it up farnsworth style like the other guy mentioned. also i found that doing like 10-15 minutes every single day beat doing an hour on saturday. the consistency thing is real, when i skipped more than a couple days i def felt it.

oh and G4FON's trainer is worth checking out if you havent, it can simulate qsb and qrm which sounds annoying but actually helps when you finally get on the air for real