so ive been running single op for about 4 years now doing mostly CW contests, CQWW, SS, a couple sprints here and there. consistently finishing in the top 20-30% of my category which im reasonably happy with but i keep looking at the top scores and wondering how much of the gap is just SO2R vs actual operating skill.

a buddy of mine runs a pretty serious SO2R setup, two radios, the whole band decoder thing with the antenna switching, he swears by it but every time i visit his shack it looks like mission control and honestly i dont know if i have the headspace to manage two radios during a run while also keeping my rate up. like when you're in a good EU run on 20 and you're clicking along at 150/hr or whatever, is switching over to S&P on 40 actually netting you enough QSOs to justify the mental overhead

i guess my real question is whether there's a middle ground — like using the second radio just for band changes or spotting without actually trying to do full interleaved operating. anyone done it that way before going full SO2R

yeah the middle ground approach is actually where most people start and honestly where a lot of competitive ops stay. running a second radio just for monitoring is sometimes called SO1.5R or people just call it SO2R lite, technically you're still SO1R if you're not transmitting on both simultaneously but whatever, semantics.

the real gain from proper SO2R isnt just grabbing extra S&P contacts on the second radio its more about never losing your run frequency when you need to go find a mult. you can be sitting on your 20m run, hear a rare mult on 15 on the second rig, work it, and be back before anyone notices you were gone. that's where the mult count starts separating top ops from mid-pack ops in my experience. the rate thing is kind of secondary actually.

for getting started i'd say get the second radio going with just headphone monitoring first, no transmit interlock or band decoder yet, just so you can hear whats happening on the other band. after a couple contests doing that you'll naturally start reaching for the second PTT and then youll want the proper setup. takes maybe 2-3 serious contests before it stops feeling like rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time

im probably not the most objective person here because i went through this exact thing last year and ended up just fully committing to SO2R setup over the summer. but honestly the thing that pushed me was SS phone where mults are so geographically spread that you just cannot compete at a high level without being able to snipe them while holding a run freq.

that said the station engineering side is no joke. if you dont have good antenna isolation between the two radios you will absolutely blow your front end or at minimum have desense that makes your second receiver basically useless while the first radio is transmitting. i went through two different bandpass filter setups before i got something that actually worked cleanly. 4O3A filters are the go-to but theyre not cheap and the whole thing with the antenna switching relay timing has to be right or you get these weird switching transients. anyway point is budget time not just money for the setup phase.

the rate gain is real though once it clicks. added probably 15-20% to my SS score first time running it properly and i wasnt even doing it well yet