so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now mostly on 40 and 20, doing okay but my rates kind of plateau around 80-90 an hour on a good run and I keep reading about guys pushing 150+ and a lot of them are running SO2R setups. I get the concept, you're working a mult on one radio while you're letting a frequency breathe on the other, but in practice I genuinely dont know how people do this without losing their mind or their run frequency.

I tried a ghetto version of it last CQWW where I had my backup rig sitting next to the main station and tried to flip between them for S&P while running on 20m. it was a complete disaster. lost my run freq twice, missed exchanges, logged a dupe because I wasnt paying attention to which radio had which callsign in the box. ended up just turning the second rig off after like an hour.

is there a learning curve I'm just not past yet or is SO2R genuinely one of those things where if your station isn't set up properly from the ground up it's more trouble than it's worth? also curious what logging software people use that actually handles dual radio well because I was just using N1MM and I think I wasnt configured right

yeah the learning curve is real, I won't sugarcoat it. I spent two full contest seasons fumbling around with SO2R before it actually started helping my score instead of hurting it. the thing nobody tells you upfront is that the software config is almost the whole battle — N1MM absolutely handles dual radio, you just have to have it set up with the right COM port assignments and the radio focus switching mapped to a footswitch or at minimum a hotkey you can hit without thinking. if you're clicking around in a window to switch focus you've already lost.

the other thing is station isolation. if your two rigs are bleeding into each other you're going to be fighting RF instead of making contacts. a lot of guys run bandpass filters between the two and that makes a huge difference. without that you're just hearing yourself on the second radio and it's miserable. once I got the microHAM controller and sorted the interlock so the radios wouldn't both TX at the same time it started to feel more manageable. but honestly for most ops, especially if you're not seriously chasing a top 10 finish, just running one radio really well will outperform sloppy SO2R every time.

I dabbled with it for about one contest and gave up lol. might go back to it someday but honestly I found that just working on my CW speed and cleaning up my exchange timing got my rate up more than the second radio ever did. like there's a lot of time being left on the table just from slow exchanges and not having a good feel for when a pileup is going to thin out enough to switch to S&P mode. the SO2R stuff seems like it's kind of the last 10-15% efficiency gain once everything else is already dialed in, at least that's my take