so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this wall around 100-110 qsos/hr during the good runs and i cant figure out if the ceiling is me or my setup. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and honestly it seems like a massive rabbit hole before you even get to the operating part.

my current setup is an ic-7300 and a ft-891 that i use for mobile, so technically i have two radios but making them play nice without cooking each other or my ears seems like a whole separate project. ive seen guys running full SO2R with band decoders and antenna switching matrices and it looks more like an engineering project than a ham radio setup. is the rate improvement actually significant enough for a guy doing like 5-6 contests a year to justify that investment, or is this more of a serious competitor thing where you're trying to shave points off a top-10 finish?

also curious if anyone has opinions on whether improving CW speed or just working on S&P vs run strategy would give me more bang for the buck before i go down the SO2R rabbit hole. feels like there might be lower hanging fruit i'm missing.

honestly for 5-6 contests a year SO2R is probably overkill unless you just enjoy the technical side of it, which some people do and thats totally valid. the antenna isolation problem alone is enough to drive you crazy — you need like 60-70dB between radios minimum if you're running both on HF simultaneously and that doesn't happen by accident.

if you're hitting 100-110/hr and want to push higher the bigger gains i've seen for most operators come from mult hunting discipline more than raw SO2R. like being really intentional about when you leave a run frequency, how long you're willing to S&P before going back to run, stuff like that. also if youre doing SSB phone contesting your audio chain matters a ton — a processed mic signal can make a surprising difference in how fast people copy you which directly affects your rate. CW is a bit more forgiving there but still, clean keying and good timing helps.

SO2R really starts making sense when you're trying to work every mult the second it shows up on the second radio while keeping the run going on the first. but getting there takes a lot of seat time just to not make mistakes with it under pressure.

the 7300 and 891 pairing is going to be rough for SO2R just because of the IF architecture on the 7300 — it's not terrible but you'd want to be really careful about harmonic relationships between your two operating frequencies. had a buddy try something similar and spent half a contest chasing a birdie that turned out to be his own second radio.

one thing that helped me a lot before i got serious about SO2R was just working on running vs searching discipline like the other guy said, and also logging speed honestly. if youre fumbling with the keyboard during an exchange that's eating into your rate more than you think. what logging software are you on? some of them have really good SO2R support built in now which lowers the bar a bit but you still need the hardware side sorted out.