so ive been doing contests for about 3 years now, mostly phone, some CW, and im starting to hit a ceiling on my rates. running somewhere around 80-100/hr on a good run which honestly feels decent but ive watched some of the top scorers put up crazy numbers and a lot of them are running SO2R setups. been reading about it and it seems like the theory is pretty straightforward — while youre waiting for a contact to complete you flip to radio 2 and either S&P or start a new run frequency — but actually implementing it without the two radios destroying each other seems like a nightmare.

my current setup is just a K3 into a hex beam and a 40m dipole, nothing fancy. to do SO2R properly i'd need another radio, some kind of switching, probably bandpass filters or a 2x2 antenna switch and station master or whatever, and then actually retraining my brain to manage two radios at once. feels like a huge investment for maybe 20% more contacts.

anyone here actually run SO2R at a competitive level and willing to be honest about whether the juice is worth the squeeze for someone not really trying to win their category, just trying to improve rates and have more fun during the contest period

honest take — SO2R is genuinely transformative for rates but the learning curve is steep and the setup cost is real. i ran single radio for years and made the jump about 4 years ago and it took me probably 6 months of regular contesting before i stopped making dumb mistakes like transmitting on the wrong radio or losing my run frequency because i wasnt managing the second VFO right. the biggest thing nobody talks about is the station engineering side. you need serious isolation between your two transmit paths or youll either blow up a front end or just have so much desense that radio 2 is useless. i run a pair of K3s with the YCCC SO2R box and an Acom 1010 on one side and a Juma PA on the other, plus SteppIR and a wire for low bands. the bandpass filters are absolutely not optional, i tried running without them once during a test and it was a disaster.

that said if youre at 80-100/hr and not trying to top the board, honestly just focus on rate optimization on a single radio first. learn to tail-end, work your S&P more efficiently, know when to run vs. search and pounce based on band conditions, all that stuff will get you another 15-20% before you ever need to think about a second radio.

yeah what he said about the filters. i tried a ghetto SO2R setup with two cheap SDRs feeding into separate audio channels and even with the transmitters on different bands the intermod was bad enough to make it pointless. ended up just going back to one radio and honestly my rate went up because i wasnt distracted trying to manage two screens and two PTT circuits that werent properly interlocked anyway. you really dont want to accidentally key both at the same time, ask me how i know