so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack in my category and i keep reading about SO2R and how it transforms your rate but honestly every time i look into it i feel like im opening a can of worms. the station complexity, the filtering issues, the second radio bleeding into everything... i dunno.

currently running a K3 and an old FT-950 that i picked up cheap, so i technically have two radios. the antenna situation is two yagis stacked for 20/15 and a wire for 40/80. my main concern is the RFI between the two rigs when both are transmitting even on different bands. i ran some tests just playing around and the second radio totally craps out when the first one is keying up on 20.

is SO2R actually worth pursuing or am i better off just focusing on single radio rate optimization? feels like i could squeeze more out of my operating technique before adding the complexity. but then again i see guys posting 1200+ QSO rates in phone contests and i cant figure out how theyre doing it without SO2R.

the RFI thing is genuinely the biggest hurdle and most people underestimate how much work it takes to get right. you're not imagining it. even with decent band-pass filters (the 4O3A or the ICE filters are what most people run) you're going to spend real time chasing down issues. it's not just the radios, it's the keying lines, the audio, everything gets weird.

that said -- once you get it dialed in it really does change what's possible. i went from consistently around 900 Q's in a weekend CQWW to cracking 1100 the first time i ran proper SO2R, and honestly my operating still wasnt great. a lot of it is just the S&P on radio 2 while youre running on radio 1, you fill in the dead seconds between contacts instead of just sitting there waiting. if your rate on radio 1 drops below like 80-90/hr it starts to really pay off.

your antenna situation might actually be okay depending on how far apart the yagis are physically. the real nightmare is when people try to do SO2R on adjacent bands with antennas close together. 20 and 40 while running is brutal without good filtering. 20 and 10 or 15 and 40 tend to be easier to manage.

honestly for where you're at i'd say work on the single radio fundamentals first. not trying to be discouraging but SO2R with intermod problems is just going to frustrate you and you might not even be sure if your rate issues are technique or equipment. the mental load of running two radios when you're still building contest reflexes is real too.

things that made a bigger difference for me before i ever touched SO2R: better CQing discipline, learning when to abandon a run frequency and go S&P, and just logging speed so i wasnt losing time fumbling around. N1MM shortcuts especially. also callsign copying accuracy under fatigue, that one sounds boring but late in a 48hr contest it matters a lot more than having a second radio.