so i've been doing SO2R half-heartedly for maybe 3 years now, never really getting the rate improvement i expected. was running two k3s with a bandmaster and some janky switching i cobbled together, and honestly my rates were sometimes worse than just running single radio because i kept screwing up the audio and transmitting on the wrong band. embarrassing stuff.

anyway last winter i finally sat down and actually thought through the workflow properly instead of just winging it and here's what changed things for me — i stopped trying to S&P on radio 2 while actively running on radio 1 at the same time. sounds obvious but i was trying to do both simultaneously which is just too much. now i use R2 strictly for finding the next CQ frequency or a mult while i'm finishing a QSO on R1. the moment i have a clear picture of where i'm going next, R2 goes quiet and i focus on closing the R1 QSO cleanly.

also the headphone audio thing was killing me. switched to totally separate audio routing with a headphone matrix box and now i can split L/R or blend however i want per radio. that alone probably added 20 QSOs per hour just from not losing my place mid-run.

anyone else have a specific thing that finally made SO2R feel natural rather than a handicap? curious what the turning point was for others

yeah the audio setup is huge and people underestimate it. i spent way too long with a cheap stereo mixer that introduced enough latency to throw off my timing. once i got proper split audio sorted out the cognitive load dropped a lot. its almost like your brain can partition the two radios once they have separate physical space in the headphones.

my turning point was honestly just logging software. i was using an older version of N1MM that didnt have the band map integration set up right, so R2 was kind of useless for hunting mults efficiently. once i actually learned the software properly — not just the basics but the SO2R specific keying delays and the alt-D type workflows — everything snapped into place. the software is doing a lot of the heavy lifting and if you fight it you'll never get the rate.

one thing i still struggle with is the interlock timing on transmit. i have a microham u2r and the defaults were a bit slow for my taste, tightened up the delays and it helped. but theres a fine line before you start getting RF into the wrong place.

I'm still on single radio and reading this thread trying to figure out if SO2R is even worth it at my license level — i just got my extra last year and i've only done maybe 4 or 5 contests seriously. is it something you can ease into or do you basically have to rebuild your whole station? seems like a big investment in switching and filtering before you see any benefit