so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for a few years now, always single radio, and i keep seeing these ridiculous scores from the SO2R guys and wondering if im leaving way too many points on the table. my station is two K3s, a pair of 2el yagis on 20 and 40 stacked on the same tower, and i do have two amps but i've never actually tried running both radios at the same time in a contest.

the interference between the two rigs is what scares me off honestly. i know people use bandpass filters and stuff but i dont really understand how guys are managing to transmit on one radio while listening on the other without just blowing their ears out or desensing everything. do you need the antennas on completely separate towers to make this viable or can you get away with the shared tower setup if the bands are far enough apart?

also just the operating itself — like the mental load of keeping a run going on one radio while S&P on the other seems like it would just destroy my rate, at least at first. anyone have a realistic sense of how long it took them to get comfortable with it? i feel like i'd spend the whole contest fumbling around and end up with a worse score than if i'd just stayed single radio.

the antenna isolation question is the right one to be asking first because that's where most people hit a wall. if you're running 20 and 40 simultaneously on the same tower, you need to think seriously about the physical separation and definitely bandpass filters — the 4O3A or Array Solutions ones are what most serious SO2R ops use. the filters alone wont save you if your antennas are 8 feet apart and you're running legal limit, but if you've got reasonable separation and you're not both on harmonically related bands at the same time you can usually make it work.

on the mental load thing — yeah, it genuinely takes time. i'd suggest trying it in a lower-stakes contest first, like a state QSO party or even just during a regular weekend pileup to get the muscle memory down. the trick i finally internalized is that you're not really running two radios, you're running one radio and using the other for what basically amounts to dead time exploitation. when you're waiting for a dupe to clear or taking a sip of coffee your main run frequency is just sitting there, so you use that time. once you stop thinking of it as two simultaneous tasks and more like opportunistic filling of gaps it gets a lot more natural.

honestly i tried SO2R for the first time in last years CQWW and pretty much fumbled through the whole thing, ended up turning the second radio off after about 6 hours because i was making too many mistakes on my run freq. so take this with that grain of salt but — i dont regret trying it. i think i'll be better at it this year just from having done it once even badly.

one thing nobody told me was to make sure your logging software is actually set up for SO2R before you start, not during the contest. i was messing with N1MM config like two hours in and that was a disaster. get that sorted way ahead of time.