Working on my CW Speed

Somepeople like antique cars. Some of my friends are into old airplanes. I have another friend who is into old houses and owns two of them. Me? I like CW.

Since becoming active in Ham radio again about 9 months ago, I’ve been working on getting my code speed up.  Actually, a more correct statement would be that I’m re-learning the code.

The best tool I’ve found is AA9PW’s More Code Practice page. Using it, I was able to quickly re-lear the code.  I started out from the beginning with the Character Speed set at 20wpm in order to get my brain used to hearing the characters at that speed.  I used the ‘Sent At’ drop-down to adjust the overall sending speed to be a little more than I can handle.

My end goal is to comprehend at 25wpm in my head without writing it down.

I’ve been setting ‘Sent At’ to 15wpm and I find that I can now copy at 10wpm easily and at 15wpm I’m catching about 80 percent. I think it’s time to do one of two things:

1. Leave the Character Speed at 20wpm and bump the overall speed up to 18wpm, or:

2. Leave the Overall speed at 15wpm but bump the Character Speed up to 25wpm to retrain my brain to hear the characters at that speed.

What do you think?