so ive been doing single op assisted for a few years now and consistently finishing in the upper tier of my section but i keep hitting this wall around 800-900 QSOs in SS phone where i just cant seem to squeeze more rate out of the setup. been reading a lot about SO2R and honestly it sounds like either a game changer or a complete nightmare depending on who you ask.

my current setup is an ic-7300 as the main rig and i have an older ft-950 sitting on the shelf doing nothing. the antenna situation is two separate dipoles on different bands so at least that part seems workable. what i dont really get is how people manage the intermod between the two radios when theyre both transmitting. like do you just accept some noise or is there actual filtering hardware you need to buy before this is even viable.

also genuinely curious whether the rate improvement is real or whether its one of those things that sounds better in theory. ive seen claimed rates of 200+ per hour from the big SO2R guys and i cant tell if thats because of SO2R specifically or just because theyre better operators running better stations in better locations.

the intermod thing is the real issue and yeah you do need hardware, theres no getting around it. at minimum you want bandpass filters on both radios before you even think about transmitting simultaneously. the 4O3A or Dunestar filters are what most people run, the 4O3A stuff is pricier but the insertion loss is lower which matters when you're already fighting for every db. if your dipoles are on different bands and reasonably separated physically you'll be in better shape than guys trying to run two verticals 20 feet apart.

on the rate question - honestly for sweepstakes specifically SO2R is maybe not where i'd start because SS is as much about mults as raw rate. what i'd look at first is your run vs S&P ratio and whether you're leaving the run freq too often to chase mults. a lot of guys kill their rate doing that. SO2R helps because you can S&P on radio 2 while you're CQing on radio 1 and not give up the run freq at all, but you need to be able to mentally split your attention and that takes actual practice, like months of operating that way before a big contest.

ran SO2R for the first time last cqww with almost exactly that same combo of radios, different models but same idea of a newer SDR-ish rig and an older one as the second. the biggest thing nobody told me was how much the logging software setup matters. i was using n1mm and getting the radio focus switching wrong for the first like four hours of the contest, kept sending on the wrong rig. had to basically restart my config at 2am which was not fun.

the rate improvement is real but i think it took me two or three contests before i was actually better than i was running single radio. first contest i was probably worse because of the cognitive load. so if you're doing sweepstakes in a few months i'd get the filters sorted now and just practice the workflow on some of the smaller contests before you throw it at SS.