so ive been on CW for about 8 months now and i feel like my sending is still kind of a mess. i can copy okay, maybe 15-18 wpm if the other op isnt rushing, but when i actually send it sounds choppy and my dits and dahs feel uneven. im using an old Bencher BY-1 paddle i picked up at a hamfest and a Winkeyer USB hooked up through Ham Radio Deluxe. the weight and tension feel fine i think, adjusted it a bunch of times already.

my question is whether this is more of a keyer timing issue i should be tweaking or if this is just something that goes away with more practice. i read something about adjusting the dit/dah ratio and weighting but honestly that whole thing confused me a little. also not sure if my hand position is off - i kind of hold it like a regular pen grip which probably isnt right. any thoughts appreciated, been at this a while and feel like im plateauing

the pen grip thing is almost certainly part of it, yeah. most people find that resting your hand flat on the table with your thumb and one or two fingers just lightly touching the paddle arms works a lot better - you want almost no tension in your hand, let the spring do the work of returning the paddle. took me forever to unlearn the grip i had when i started.

as for the weighting, i wouldnt mess with the dit/dah ratio too much unless something sounds obviously wrong. the default 3:1 is standard for a reason. what i WOULD do is slow down in the Winkeyer settings, even if it feels painfully slow, and just try to send clean text rather than fast text. speed comes by itself once the muscle memory is there. the choppy feeling usually means you're squeezing too hard or anticipating the next character before finishing the current one. also try practicing single letters and common words over and over rather than always sending random QSO text.

i had basically the same problem for the first year lol. one thing that actually helped me weirdly was listening to a lot of CW - like just putting on W1AW practice broadcasts or even just YouTube videos of good operators and letting it run in the background while doing other stuff. i think my brain eventually figured out the rhythm and my sending got better even though i wasnt specifically practicing sending. weird but it worked for me. also the Bencher BY-1 is a solid paddle so its def not the hardware