so ive been doing contests for about 3 years now, mostly SS and sweepstakes phone plus some CQ WW mixed in. been running single op single radio the whole time and generally doing ok, nothing spectacular but i hold my own. a buddy of mine keeps telling me i need to get into SO2R to really push my rates up and i keep putting it off because honestly the whole setup looks like a nightmare to manage.

my current station is an ic-7300 and a spare ts-590sg sitting in the corner doing basically nothing, so the hardware is kind of already there. i know i need bandpass filters at minimum and probably some kind of antenna switching logic so i dont blow up a frontend. the two radios share a tribander up on the tower and i have a 40m dipole so its not like i have amazing antenna separation to work with.

the thing is i dont know if the mental overhead of juggling two radios is actually worth it at my skill level. i feel like id just be making more mistakes and losing QSOs rather than gaining them. anyone gone through this transition and have thoughts on whether it actually moved the needle for you?

yeah the learning curve is real and honestly if you're already feeling shaky on rate management with one radio, adding a second one doesnt magically fix that. what it does is let you work a multiplier on 15 while you're running 20, which over a 48 hour contest adds up to a lot. but you gotta be comfortable enough with logging and frequency control that it becomes almost automatic before the second radio actually helps you.

your antenna situation is the bigger concern though. sharing a tribander between two radios on adjacent bands with no real physical separation is going to be rough. you'd want at least the bandpass filters you mentioned, i use the W3NQN style filters and they're pretty solid but even then if both radios are cranking into the same antenna system you're going to hear yourself. some people run bandpass plus a good RF-sensing relay system to handle the antenna switching so only one radio keys at a time, which takes some of the mental load off at least.

honestly my suggestion would be to try SO2R lite first — meaning you use the second radio purely for listening and spotting mults, dont transmit on it at all. no filter worries, no coordination headaches. get used to splitting your attention before you try to actually transmit on both. took me probably two full contest seasons before i felt like the second radio was actually helping my score.

i tried to go SO2R a couple years back and kinda gave up halfway through the setup because the intermod was making me insane. ended up just using the second radio on a completely separate antenna on a different band and never transmitting on both at the same time, which like the other guy said is kind of SO2R lite. still helped me snag mults i would have missed.

one thing nobody told me starting out — the logging software coordination between two radios matters almost as much as the RF stuff. N1MM+ handles it pretty well if you set it up right but if the second radio isnt talking to the software properly you end up with dupes and it gets messy fast. might be worth just getting that side dialed in before you even worry about the filtering.