so ive been doing contests semi-seriously for a few years now, usually top 10 or so in my section but nothing crazy. been reading a lot about SO2R and rate optimization lately and honestly im not sure if its worth the headache for someone at my level or if i should just focus on squeezing more out of single radio operation first.

my current setup is a k3 into a 3 element yagi on 20 and a dipole for 40/80, nothing exotic. during cqww last year i was running maybe 80-90 qsos an hour on a good run which i know isnt elite but felt pretty solid to me. the thing is i watch videos of the big guns and half their rate comes from hunting mults on the second radio while keeping a run frequency, and i just wonder how much of that is actually learnable vs needing a whole different station setup.

anyone gone through this transition and can tell me honestly if it changed their scores significantly or was it mostly just more stress for marginal gains at the non-superstation level

honestly the biggest gains ive seen arent even from SO2R, its from learning when to abandon a run and go S&P vs when to sit and grind. took me probably 3-4 serious contest efforts before i really internalized that. your 80-90/hr rate is decent and there's probably 15-20 qsos per hour still sitting on the table from smarter frequency management and knowing the band openings cold before the contest even starts.

that said SO2R does work and it isnt as complicated as people make it out to be. the hardest part isnt the hardware, its training your brain to actually listen to two things without losing your run frequency to some pistol who swoops in the second you QSY. i run a pretty simple setup, second radio is just an old ft-1000mp with a spare antenna, nothing fancy, and the interlock situation is manageable if you plan it out. but i wouldnt jump to it until you feel like youre really maxing out what single radio can do. theres still a ton of room to grow there for most people

rate optimization before SO2R, full stop imo. when i started taking scores seriously i realized i was wasting like 10-15 minutes per hour just from sloppy exchanges, not having the dupe checking dialed in, slow callsign copies etc. fixing that stuff is free and it compounds over a 48 hour effort in a big way.

the SO2R rabbit hole is real and its deep. youre looking at station separation headaches, bandpass filters, sometimes separate antennas for each radio pointed different directions, the whole thing. K3 is actually a pretty good starting point for it if you get a second one since the band switching is fast but you still need to think through the RF isolation or youll blow up your front ends. i went through two contest seasons of intermittent RX problems before i figured out my issue was basically the second transmitter desensing the first radio's preamp on adjacent bands. not fun to diagnose mid contest