so ive been doing single op for a few years now and every time i look at the top scores in sweepstakes or SS phone the guys crushing it are almost all running SO2R. i get the basic concept, you're listening on one radio while youre transmitting on the other, picking up mults or finding a run freq, but i honestly dont know if its worth the setup pain for someone who only does maybe 4-5 contests a year.

right now i have an IC-7300 as my main rig and a spare FT-857D sitting in the closet doing nothing. my antenna situation is a hex beam at about 35 feet and a 40m dipole, both on separate feedlines so at least i have that going for me. the main thing im worried about is RFI between the two radios, ive heard that can get really ugly if youre not careful with filtering and band-pass filters.

anyone actually made the jump from single radio to SO2R on a modest station and seen a meaningful rate improvement? or is the gain mostly coming from station infrastructure and not the second radio itself? trying to figure out if i should invest in a proper SO2R controller like the microHAM stuff or just try to cobble something together first to see if it even makes sense for my setup.

the interference thing is the real gotcha and most people underestimate it until their 40m radio is deafened by their own 20m signal. if your two antennas have decent physical separation youre already ahead of a lot of people, but youll almost certainly need band-pass filters. the 4O3A or Array Solutions bandpass sets are the standard go-to, they're not cheap but trying to do SO2R without them on a real station is kind of an exercise in frustration.

that said, for sweepstakes specifically i'd argue the SO2R benefit is a bit more nuanced than people let on. SS is as much about working all the sections as it is raw rate, so having that second radio tuned to a mult band while you run on the other one is genuinely useful, especially late in the contest when youre hunting that one WY or ND or whatever you're missing. i made the jump with a similar setup to yours a couple years back, cobbled it together with a used SO2R box from a guy on the reflector, and yeah it helped, maybe 10-15% more QSOs but the mult pickup was the real payoff.

honestly just try it without a controller first to get a feel for the workflow before you spend money on microHAM stuff. its a lot of mental load at first and some people decide its not worth it, thats a legitimate conclusion too.

yeah what he said about the filtering. i tried SO2R without bandpass filters once, never again. my second radio was basically useless any time i was transmitting on the other one even with the antennas on different bands. ended up just running single radio that whole contest lol.

one thing nobody mentions enough is the logging software side of things. N1MM+ handles SO2R pretty well but you gotta get the radio switching set up right or youll be sending on the wrong rig at the worst possible moment. had that happen during a run in CQWW and lost probably 5 minutes sorting it out while people were calling me. anyway its doable on a budget station but go in with realistic expectations i think.