so ive been doing SS phone and CW for about four years now and keep finishing in the middle of the pack for my section. decent rate in the first few hours then it just dies off and i end up S&P-ing for the last six hours which is painful. a buddy of mine keeps telling me SO2R is the answer but honestly setting it up looks like a nightmare and im not sure my antennas are spaced far enough apart to even try it without everything bleeding into everything else.

current setup is a K3 and an IC-7300, so the hardware is theoretically there if i add a second amp and sort out the interlocking so i dont key both at the same time. but like... does the rate improvement actually justify rebuilding basically my whole station? i've read the N6TR and K1ZM stuff on SO2R and it sounds great in theory but those guys have serious stations. anybody running SO2R from a suburban lot with compromise antennas actually seeing a meaningful rate bump or is it mostly diminishing returns unless you're already running a kilowatt into a stack?

honest answer: it depends a lot on what's killing your rate. if youre losing time to dead bands between multiplier runs then yeah SO2R helps a ton because you can be listening for a run frequency on radio 2 while you work the pileup on radio 1. but if your rate is dying because the band is genuinely dead or your signal isn't competitive then a second radio wont fix that.

i ran SO2R for the first time last ARRL DX CW from a pretty modest setup, two dipoles about 90 feet apart and a TS-590 plus an old FT-1000MP. the key thing was getting the band decoder sorted with the microHAM and making absolutely sure the interlock was solid before i ever touched the paddles. had one scary moment in testing where i almost keyed both rigs simultaneously but caught it. once that was sorted the actual operating was way more natural than i expected after like an hour of getting used to it. rate went up maybe 15-20% compared to my previous single radio effort, which on a 24 hour contest is actually meaningful.

the antenna isolation thing is real though. you probably want at least 20-30 dB of isolation between the two rigs when you're transmitting on one and trying to receive on the other, otherwise you'll just be deaf on radio 2 every time radio 1 is on. worth modeling your specific situation before assuming it'll work.

I'll push back a little on the idea that SO2R is the obvious next step for a mid-pack finisher. I went down that road a few years ago and spent two contest seasons fighting RFI and intermod instead of actually improving my operating. Ended up pulling the second radio out and just focused on running cleaner single-radio, worked on my CW speed, got my exchange down to like 2 seconds, learned to find clear frequencies faster. Went from mid-pack to top 10 in section without any of the SO2R complexity.

Not saying SO2R doesn't work, it clearly does for the top ops, but there's a lot of rate you can find in single-radio discipline first. things like how fast you move after a dupe, how aggressively you hold a run frequency, when you decide to give up and S&P vs keep calling CQ. That stuff compounds over 24 or 48 hours way more than people realize.