so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, and i keep reading about SO2R and how the top guys are running two radios simultaneously to keep their rates up during the slow periods. i get the concept — while youre waiting for a pileup to thin out on one band you can be running a freq or SandPing on the other. sounds great in theory.

but honestly every time i try to wrap my head around the actual setup it gets complicated fast. like youre dealing with antenna switching, bandpass filters so the two radios dont blow each others front ends out, the audio mixing so you can monitor both without going crazy, keying interlocks so you dont transmit on both at the same time... its a lot. my current station is just an IC-7300 into a tribander at 35 feet, pretty modest.

my rates during SS and CQWW are decent i think, usually pulling 80-100/hr during the good runs and then it falls off a cliff during the slow hours. is SO2R realistically going to help someone at my level or am i better off just working on my CQing technique and search and pounce efficiency first? feel like theres probably lower hanging fruit before i go full tilt on a second radio setup.

honest answer — yeah there's lower hanging fruit first. SO2R done right is probably a 10-15% rate improvement for a mid-tier station and setup but the overhead to get it working cleanly is substantial. if you're losing rate because your run frequency technique is soft or you're not multiplier hunting efficiently in the right windows, fix that first. the two radio thing really shines when you already have your single radio game dialed and you're just looking to squeeze the last bit out of the slow hours.

that said the bandpass filter thing isn't as bad as it sounds if you're on different bands that are well separated. 20 and 40 with a decent set of filters like the Array Solutions or even the ICE bandpass filters, you can make it work without totally destroying your wallet. the audio mixing is honestly the harder thing to get comfortable with psychologically. running two decoders in your head at once takes practice and some people never really get comfortable with it. i ran SO2R for the first time seriously at CQWW a couple years ago and i probably lost as much time fumbling with the setup as i gained in rate the first 6 hours.

the interlock thing is what bit me when i first tried it. forgot to properly configure the keying interlock in N1MM and briefly had both rigs keyed up at the same time into antennas that were not well isolated. nothing blew up but it was a bad moment. make sure whatever logging software you use has that sorted before you key anything up.