David Thomas

could also be the ALC feedback loop doing something weird — i know you said it looked normal but what does it look like during the rolloff, is it climbing as the power drops? if the radio thinks its getting too much RF back for some reason it'll throttle itself down. had a cap in the ALC circuit go soft on an older Kenwood and it did something similar, took forever to figure out because the symptom looked thermal but wasnt. also worth checking if you have the RF power control set to max or if something got changed in the menu settings, ive seen people accidentally bump the output setting and then spend days debugging what was basically a user error lol. not saying thats your problem just worth ruling out quick

yeah that wall around 8-10wpm is super common, pretty much everyone hits it. what's happening is your brain is still spelling out individual letters instead of hearing whole words as sounds, and that transition is genuinely hard. the Farnsworth method your buddy mentioned — that's exactly the right move, it trains your ear to hear characters at real speed even when there's space between them so you never develop the habit of counting dots and dashes. i went through this myself maybe six years ago. what actually helped me more than anything was just listening to real QSOs on 40m with a decoder running alongside so i could sanity check what i was hearing. even if i only copied 40% of it something about real callsigns and real exchanges made it click faster than any software trainer. w1aw also does code practice broadcasts at different speeds and they publish the text ahead of time so you can follow along — honestly underrated resource. as for getting on the air, just do it. seriously. find a slow speed net, there are a few specifically for people practicing. nobody is going to laugh at you for sending 8wpm, cw ops are generally pretty patient with folks learning. the real contacts will help more than another month of offline practice, i promise.