so ive been doing single op contesting for a few years now, mostly on 40 and 20, and i keep hearing guys talk about SO2R like its the holy grail but every time i try to wrap my head around the actual setup it just seems like a massive amount of complexity for... what exactly? like yes i get that youre running on one radio while the other is finding the next contact but in practice how much rate improvement are we actually talking about?

my current setup is a k3 into a 4el yagi on 20 and a dipole on 40, nothing exotic. heard you basically need two complete stations with good isolation between them which means bandpass filters and probably a SO2R controller box and i dunno, at some point arent you just adding failure points. had a buddy who spent the whole first night of sweepstakes chasing an RFI problem between his two rigs instead of actually operating

the guys putting up big numbers in the single op category, are they mostly SO2R or is it possible to be competitive doing single radio if your rate discipline is really good? genuinely asking because i dont want to spend money on a second radio if the real gains are just in operating smarter on one

honest answer is it depends a lot on the contest and your goals. for something like CQWW or SS where multipliers matter as much as QSO count, SO2R lets you keep running on your good frequency while hunting mults on the second radio without breaking your run rate. thats the real gain, not just raw QSOs per hour. if youre doing a pure rate contest the benefit is still there but maybe less dramatic

the isolation thing is real though. you need either good bandpass filters like the 4O3A or ICE filters, or you need to be on bands that are far enough apart that your transmit on one doesnt blow the front end on the other. 20 and 40 is actually not the worst combo for that. the controller stuff is less intimidating than it sounds once you get into it, most guys use the microHAM stuff or a winkeyer setup and N1MM handles a lot of the sequencing automatically now

but yeah if your fundamentals arent solid on single radio first, adding a second one just gives you twice as many ways to screw up. id say get your search and pounce timing really clean, learn to read band conditions on the fly, work on your exchange speed. SO2R amplifies good operating, it doesnt fix bad operating

your buddy's RFI story is pretty much every first SO2R attempt lol. i spent about three contests just debugging before i ever got a clean run going. the bandpass filters are not optional, learned that the hard way when i was keying up on 15 and my 40m audio turned into a wall of hash

one thing nobody told me early on is that SO2R isnt really about having two radios running flat out simultaneously, its more like... you have a radio thats running a pileup and a radio thats your scout, and you're listening to both but only ever transmitting on one at a time with a small guard time between them. N1MM plus has the alt+arrow key stuff built in for this and once it clicks it really does click. took me a full season to feel natural with it though

if youre not regularly putting up top 10 scores in your category on single radio i wouldnt bother yet honestly. get the rate discipline first like you said