so ive been doing SS phone and CW for about 6 years now and always ran single radio. finally built out a proper SO2R setup this past year, two K3s, a TopTen bandmaster, separate antennas for each radio with decent isolation, the whole thing. spent probably 3 weekends just getting the intermod and RFI under control enough to actually use both radios without one wiping out the other.

ran my first real SO2R contest last month during a state QSO party and honestly i'm not sure the rate improvement justified the mental overhead. like yeah i was probably 15-20% higher on contacts per hour during the good runs but i kept fat-fingering the wrong radio, sending on the wrong VFO, that kind of thing. felt like i was flying the airplane AND reading the checklist at the same time.

people who have been doing SO2R for a while — does it just click eventually or is there something specific about how you train yourself to manage the second radio without it eating your focus on the run frequency. i'm using N1MM and have the SO2R stuff configured but im wondering if my keyer macros and the way i have my footswitch set up is just not optimized. open to hearing how other people have their workflow set up.

yeah it takes a while, not gonna sugarcoat it. the first few contests i ran SO2R i actually had lower scores than my single radio efforts because the cognitive load just tanked my accuracy. what helped me was basically treating the second radio like a totally passive thing for the first hour or two of a contest — just run on radio 1, let radio 2 sit on a promising mult frequency you already found, and only touch it when you've got a natural gap in the pileup. dont try to actively S&P on both simultaneously until it becomes muscle memory.

footswitch setup matters a lot. i have mine configured so one press locks audio to the active TX radio and i drilled that into my hands before i ever got on the air with it. the other thing is your macro timing — if your exchanges are sloppy or too long you're giving yourself less dead time to work the second radio. tighten up the macros, cut the unnecessary words, every second counts when you're trying to sneak in a S&P contact between run QSOs.

i tried SO2R once during field day and gave up after about 20 minutes lol. different situation i know since field day scoring isnt really rate-dependent the same way. but honestly reading your post makes me curious — do you find the antenna isolation issue ever fully goes away or is it just something you manage around. i've got two radios now and have thought about doing this but the RF management piece seems like it could get ugly depending on band combo. what bands were you running simultaneously during the QSO party