so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for a few years now and my rates have been plateauing around 80-90/hr during the good runs and then just falling off a cliff in the second half when the mults start drying up. been reading a lot about SO2R and wondering if its actually worth setting up for someone at my level or if im better off just working on my CW speed and S&P efficiency first.

right now im running an IC-7300 into a tribander at 50ft and a 40m dipole, nothing fancy. the idea of adding a second radio sounds appealing on paper but i honestly dont know how people deal with the RF interference between the two radios when theyre both transmitting in the same band contest. like do you just accept some desense or is there a whole antenna isolation thing you need to solve first before it even makes sense to try.

also curious if anyone has thoughts on when to switch from running to S&P and back. i feel like i leave a lot of points on the table because i hold a frequency too long when the rate drops instead of going hunting. any rules of thumb people actually use in practice not just the textbook stuff

the antenna isolation question is the real one and honestly its what stops most people from actually pulling off SO2R cleanly. the short answer is you need somewhere between 40-60dB of isolation between the two antenna ports depending on your band combo and even then youre probably going to want bandpass filters in line. the 4O3A or the Array Solutions stuff works but its not cheap. running 40 and 15 simultaneously is way more forgiving than trying to do 20 and 15 where the harmonics start getting ugly.

that said for SS specifically where youre stuck to one band at a time per the rules youre mostly using radio 2 for listening and spotting yourself mentally, not actually transmitting on it. so the isolation thing is less catastrophic than in a multi-band contest. you can get away with a lot more slop in that scenario.

on your S&P vs running question — i usually give myself a hard mental limit of like 3-4 CQs with no answer before i start moving. in the second half of SS especially sunday morning you really have to be more aggressive about hunting mults because the rate just isnt coming back to you on a run frequency, at least not at 100w. the guys running legal limit can hold a freq longer because they can pull the weaker stations through but at your power level mobility is your friend

yeah i had the same plateau problem for a while. one thing that helped me more than any gear change was just logging analysis after the contest. like actually pulling up my cabrillo and looking at where my rate died and what i was doing at those times. turns out i was spending way too long calling CQ on a dead frequency out of some weird reluctance to give it up. the data doesnt lie.

SO2R is great but its also kind of a mental load thing. ive seen guys with full SO2R setups put up worse scores than simpler stations because they were spending half their brain managing the second radio instead of just operating. if youre not already comfortable enough with the first radio that its basically automatic, adding a second one might actually hurt you. just something to think about before you go buying more gear