so ive been doing single op contesting for a few years now mostly CW but started getting into phone last year and everyone keeps telling me SO2R is the way to go if you want to be competitive in the upper score tiers. i get the concept, running on one radio while S&P on the other, but every time i try to set it up in practice it just feels like im making more mistakes than i would just focusing on one radio.

my setup right now is a K3 and an IC-7300 with a tribander and a 40m dipole. the antenna switching and the audio routing is where i keep getting tangled up. i did CQWW phone last year and my rate was decent i think, peaked around 180/hr on 20m during the good hours, but i felt like i left a lot of multipliers on the table because i wasnt monitoring 40 at the same time.

is there a point where the complexity just isnt worth it and you'd be better off just optimizing your single radio operation instead? or is this one of those things where once you get the workflow down it becomes second nature and you cant imagine going back?

honest answer — it depends on how serious you want to get. for a lot of guys who are chasing top 10 nationally it's basically mandatory at this point, but if youre not in that bracket already the gains from just improving your single radio operating are probably bigger than anything SO2R gives you.

that said the audio routing is the part that trips most people up and once you solve that piece the rest sort of falls into place. a lot of guys use a headphone mixing setup so one ear is the run radio and one ear is the S&P radio at lower volume, takes some getting used to but your brain adapts. the antenna isolation side of things with a K3 and 7300 is more annoying since youre dealing with two different manufacturers and the intermod situation can get ugly depending on how close your antennas are.

180/hr peak on phone 20m is solid work for single radio honestly. i wouldnt rush into SO2R just because someone told you to, get your rate consistency up first and then add the complexity when it stops feeling like complexity if that makes sense.

I tried SO2R for about two contests and gave it up, went back to focused single radio and actually did better. maybe im just not wired for it. the guys who really make it work seem to have been doing it for years and have their shack dialed in perfectly for it, like dedicated SO2R keyers and proper station automation. trying to bolt it onto an existing setup always felt kludgy to me.

one thing that did help my rate more than anything else was just being more aggressive about when to switch from running to S&P and back. a lot of people stay on a dead run frequency way too long out of habit.