so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for a few years now and keep going back and forth on whether to finally set up SO2R properly. right now im running one radio (K3) into a 2el yagi at 45ft and doing okay, usually end up somewhere in the 800-900 QSO range which honestly im pretty happy with for a single weekend. but i keep watching the top scores and the guys beating me by 30-40% are almost all running two radios.

the thing is my shack is a mess and adding a second rig means dealing with RFI between them which i've heard is a whole project in itself. i've got an old TS-590 sitting on the shelf that i could press into service but the bandpass filtering situation is what's holding me back. was looking at the 2x2 bandpass filters from 4O3A and they're not cheap. is there a cheaper way to do this that actually works or am i gonna spend a bunch of money and still have the two radios stomping on each other

also separately — anyone have good advice on rate optimization just as SO1R? like i feel like my CQing strategy could use work. i tend to jump around a lot instead of planting on a frequency and running, not sure if thats hurting me

SO2R is absolutely worth it once you get the filtering sorted but yeah its not a weekend project, took me probably two contest seasons before i felt like i actually had it dialed in rather than fighting it the whole time. the 4O3A filters are the gold standard but honestly the homebrew W3NQN filters work great if you're handy with a soldering iron, theres a full writeup on his site and the parts from Mouser are maybe $60-80 per band pair. i built a set for 40/15 which is where i spend most of my time in SS and the isolation is plenty good enough.

for SO1R rate — your instinct about running vs S&P is right, the best ops usually plant on a good frequency early and defend it. if you're getting 3+ per minute on a run you almost never want to leave it to go search. the multiplier calculus is different in SS than other contests though since you only need each section once so late in the contest you might be S&P hunting mults more aggressively. main thing is just be decisive, a lot of people waste time being indecisive about whether to leave a run freq and that kills rate more than the actual decision either way.

the RFI thing is real but people overcomplicate it sometimes. before you spend money on bandpass filters make sure your coax connectors are actually tight and your ground system is solid, ive seen setups where the second radio was killing the first one and it turned out to be a bad PL-259 letting RF into the shack. also the K3 and 590 are both pretty good receivers so you might be surprised how well they play together on different bands even without fancy filters, just dont try to run them on the same band or adjacent bands without isolation.

honestly for SS specifically since its only 24 hours i might just try it one year without perfect filtering and see what happens. worst case you deal with some noise. best case it works fine and you learned something.