so ive been doing contests for maybe 3 years now, mostly single op on one radio, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack for my category. im not trying to win anything serious but i do like pushing my rate up and seeing how high i can get the score. lately ive been reading a lot about SO2R and i cant decide if its worth the complexity for someone at my level.

my current setup is an IC-7300 into a hex beam at about 35 feet. i have an old TS-570 sitting in the closet that still works fine. so in theory i have the hardware for a basic SO2R but i know theres way more to it than just plugging in two radios. the filtering situation alone seems like a nightmare, especially since my antennas arent exactly great at band separation.

my main question i guess is whether SO2R actually improves your rate enough to justify all the setup headaches, or whether id be better off just focusing on better run/S&P balance and band change timing. ive been reading about the SO2R technique where you use the second radio to find a mult while youre running but that seems like it requires a level of mental bandwidth i might not have during a fast CW contest. ssb would maybe be more manageable?

anyone gone through this transition and have thoughts on whether it was worth it

honestly for most people the biggest rate gains dont come from SO2R, they come from learning to run properly. like if youre not already comfortable holding a frequency during a pileup and keeping your CQ rate clean, adding a second radio is just gonna split your attention in a bad way. i ran single radio for years and got my CW rate up to around 120-130/hr on good band conditions just by being more disciplined about when to S&P vs when to stay and run.

that said, SO2R is absolutely real for mult hunting. the classic use case is youre running 20m and you hear 15 is opening, you can jump the second radio over and snag a few mults without killing your run frequency. but the filtering thing you mentioned is the real issue. if your antennas are close together and on different bands youre gonna get a lot of desense unless you have good bandpass filters. the Array Solutions or the Dunestar stuff works well but its not cheap. i tried it once with a cheap diplexer and it was a mess.

if i were you id focus on contest strategy first. learn to predict band openings for your location, practice your exchange until its muscle memory, and work on rate discipline. then maybe revisit SO2R when that stuff is second nature.

yeah what he said about the filtering is no joke. i blew an afternoon trying to run my 7300 and an old Kenwood simultaneously without proper bandpass filters and basically just made both radios useless. there are some good writeups on the N6TR and K9CT sites about SO2R setups if you want to go down that rabbit hole but budget at least a few hundred bucks for the filter situation before you even think about software integration.

one thing i'll add that nobody talks about much is the SO2R mental load is really different on phone vs CW. on phone you cant really monitor the second radio in your ear the same way you can with CW because your brain processes speech differently. some guys use one ear per radio on CW and it becomes kind of natural after a while. phone SO2R is a lot harder imo.