so ive been doing contests pretty seriously for about 3 years now, mostly single band stuff but lately ive been running SO2R on some of the bigger weekends like CQWW and sweepstakes and honestly im not sure if im actually gaining rate or just stressing myself out more

my setup right now is an IC-7300 on the run radio and an old TS-570 as the second radio, running them both through a microHAM station master for the switching and bandpass filters from Array Solutions, nothing fancy but it works okay. the issue is my brain hasnt caught up with the hardware yet if that makes sense. like ill be calling CQ on 20 and miss a dupe check on the second radio because im trying to do two things at once

for people who have actually gotten SO2R to click — how long did it realistically take before it stopped feeling like youre juggling chainsaws. and is there a particular contest that works better for learning the workflow, like is a shorter sprint style thing better to practice on than a 48 hour marathon

yeah the chainsaws thing is pretty accurate honestly. it took me probably a full contest season before SO2R stopped costing me rate instead of adding it. the thing nobody tells you upfront is that the second radio is only useful if your run frequency is locked in and you have genuine dead time to fill — if youre in a pileup or calling CQ every 5 seconds there really isnt a window to work it

for learning id actually suggest trying it during a slower part of a 48 hour contest rather than a sprint. sprints move too fast and you end up just abandoning the second radio out of panic. like sunday afternoon of CQWW when NA is thinning out and europe hasnt fully come up yet, thats when you can actually practice using the second radio to snipe mults on 15 or 10 without it wrecking your 20m run. also make sure your logging software is doing the heavy lifting on dupes, N1MM with the bandmap doing the checking for you is basically essential, youre not gonna do that manually under pressure

the microHAM station master is solid gear for that setup, good choice there. one thing that helped me a lot early on was just running the second radio receive-only for a while before actually transmitting on it. like literally just tuning around and keeping mental notes without keying anything up. gets your brain used to monitoring two things without the added pressure of actually working stations on both. then you start just grabbing easy mults when they pop up, nothing aggressive. honestly for casual contesters the rate gain from SO2R is probably modest anyway unless youre already consistently running above like 100-120 qsos per hour, at that point the time you spend tuning the second radio is time you couldve spent calling CQ