so ive been running single op for years and my rate kind of plateaus around 80-90 qsos/hr during the busy parts of sweepstakes and i keep watching the top scores and wondering how much of that gap is just SO2R vs skill vs whatever else. ive got a second radio sitting in the shack that i mostly use for monitoring and i started thinking about actually wiring it up properly for SO2R before november.

the antenna switching is the part thats making my head hurt. right now im running a 3 element yagi on 20 and a dipole situation on 40 and i dont really have great isolation between the two feedlines. i know you need serious filtering to make it work otherwise youre just blasting your own ears and front end every time you transmit on radio 1. the ICE or Array Solutions bandpass filters seem to be the standard answer but man the cost adds up fast when you start stacking them.

my actual question i guess is whether anyone went from single op to SO2R and actually saw a meaningful rate improvement first time out, or does it take a full contest season to get the operating technique dialed in enough to matter. im not trying to win anything just want to squeeze more out of the time i have to operate.

honest answer: the first contest i tried SO2R i was probably 15% worse than just running S&P on one radio because i kept fumbling the footswitch timing and missing exchanges on both radios at once. it took me maybe 3 contests before it started feeling natural and probably a full year before i was actually extracting rate from it consistently.

the filtering thing is real and you cant really cut corners on it. i tried running with just the internal ATU doing some of the work and a single bandpass filter and yeah it was a mess. eventually got a full set of 6m-10m ICE filters and did the proper station ground buss and it cleaned up almost completely. the antenna isolation actually matters a lot too — if your two antennas are physically close and on adjacent bands you're going to fight intermod no matter what you do in the shack.

for sweepstakes specifically the SO2R advantage is really about using the second radio to find a run frequency on the next band while you're still running on the first one. the mult hunting angle is a little less dramatic in SS since everybody works everybody but the band transition timing gets way smoother once you have that second radio listening ahead for you. worth doing IMO but set your expectations for the learning curve.

the bandpass filters are non negotiable if your antennas are anywhere near each other. i learned that the expensive way. even with good isolation on the feedlines the rf gets in through the ground path and just causes all kinds of weird behavior — audio artifacts, the S meter going nuts, one radio resetting on big transmit pulses, all of it.

Array Solutions makes decent stuff and the Dunestar filters get recommended a lot too. if budget is the issue some guys build the W3NQN filters from scratch which are supposed to be excellent but thats a project in itself. anyway dont cheap out on that part of the build or youll spend the whole contest troubleshooting instead of operating which kind of defeats the whole point