Most of my time learning and operating CW, I've felt like I needed to speed up my CW. That has meant lots of time operating faster than I actually can, practicing with things like morsecode.world, and listening to fast code.

But most of my time operating CW is with the Straight Key Century Club, and while there are some real speed daemons there running bugs at 30+ wpm, most of the folks you work there are happy to work below 15 wpm.

While I can't copy super slow code (I can't hold it in my head long enough to form words), I can do 10 to 13 wpm okay. But I cannot send at that speed. My straight key arm just wants to send around 17 wpm. That's where the dits feel natural and I don't have to think about forming characters. When folks are sending slower, I try to compensate by having longer spaces between characters (the Farnsworth approach). That typically helps me when someone is sending faster than I can copy, but that's probably because I learned CW recently following the modern advice (from some schools at least) to use fast character speed. But I know a lot of folks I want to talk to did not learn that way, and a lot would really appreciate if I would just send at 12 wpm rather than 17 wpm with 12 wpm spacing.

All this is to say, I want to learn to send slower. The Straight Key Century Club has a slow speed event on the first of each month. I think that would be a good opportunity for me to get some on the air practice in. Before that I can spend some time doing sending practice at slower speeds. Unfortunately, I don't have any good software to hook up my key to in order to really track myself, but I can listen to some slower code, record my sending, and compare.