been doing SO2R seriously for maybe 3 seasons now and i feel like im still leaving rate on the table. not asking about the basics, i know how to run and S&P at the same time, got the radio focus switching dialed in, interlocks are set up right. what im trying to figure out is more the strategic layer on top of that.

like for example — when youre running a pileup on radio 1, how aggressive are you about pulling away to grab a multiplier on radio 2 that might not be there in 20 minutes. i keep second guessing myself. sometimes i stop a good run to snag a mult and then the run frequency gets picked up by someone else and ive lost both. but other times i wait and the mult disappears. theres got to be some rule of thumb people use or maybe just experience. also curious if anyone has thoughts on which contests are actually worth the SO2R overhead versus just focusing on single radio execution. CQWW and SS seem obvious but im not sure its worth the setup for like a state QSO party.

the mult vs rate tradeoff is something i argued about with my club guys for years and honestly i dont think there's one answer, it depends so much on where you are in the contest. early on id say chase the mult almost always, especially if its one of those that wont show up again — a rare DXCC on 10m at the start of CQWW when the band is open, you go get it even if you break a decent run. late in the contest when youve already worked most of the mults and youre just grinding rate, i get a lot more reluctant to stop a good run for a single point mult.

the thing that actually helped me most wasnt a rule of thumb, it was logging software mult alerts with band-specific tracking. when i can see that a mult only shows up once on 40 every 2 hours in my history, that changes my calculus. N1MM+ has tools for this if you dig into it. and yeah for state QSO parties i mostly single radio it, the SO2R overhead genuinely doesnt pencil out unless the exchange is fast and the rate gets high enough to justify managing two pileups.

so anyway the thing that clicked for me was thinking about it less as interrupting a run and more like — the run is always going to be there or something equivalent will be there, but that JA on 15m at 0200z might literally not come back. i started timing my radio 2 excursions to the natural gaps, like when i send my callsign and exchange i have maybe 3-4 seconds while theyre copying, thats enough to hit a beacon or check a spotted freq on radio 2 without really breaking stride. doesnt work on ssb obviously but on cw with reasonable speed youve got wiggle room.

also one thing nobody talks about enough is antenna interaction when youre both transmitting close in freq. i burned a whole contest before i figured out my SO2R setup was causing IMD that was wrecking my receive on radio 1 every time radio 2 keyed up. fixed it with better bandpass filters but it took me embarassingly long to diagnose because everything looked fine on paper.