so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now and im starting to hit a ceiling on my rates. i can get into the low 100s per hour during a good run but it feels like i plateau pretty fast once the initial pileup dies down. a buddy of mine keeps telling me SO2R is the answer but honestly every time i look into it i get kind of overwhelmed by the station complexity.

right now im running a k3 into a 2el yagi on 20 and a dipole on 40, pretty modest setup. the idea of adding a second radio and dealing with RFI between the two rigs just sounds like a whole weekend of troubleshooting waiting to happen. is there a sane way to ease into SO2R without completely rebuilding everything? or is it really more about operating technique than the hardware at this point.

also just curious — for guys who do it well, how much of your rate improvement came from SO2R vs just getting better at running a frequency and not wasting time between QSOs. because i sometimes wonder if my real problem is i let too much dead air happen between contacts and im blaming my setup instead of my technique

honest answer — yeah you might be overthinking the SO2R side of it. the dead air thing you mentioned at the end is probably a bigger deal than you realize. i used to lose like 3-4 seconds between every QSO just fumbling with logging and not having my exchange ready to go and that adds up fast over 24 hours. before i ever touched a second radio i went from 90/hr to like 115 just by getting more disciplined about keeping the run frequency while S&P-ing on another band in my head — knowing roughly where to go next so i wasnt spinning the dial blind.

that said, SO2R does genuinely add rate once you hit a propagation lull. the classic use case is youre running 20m and it starts dying out in the afternoon, instead of just sitting there calling CQ into nothing you can be working a whole run on 40 at the same time. but yeah the RFI situation is real, you pretty much need bandpass filters minimum and a lot of guys use separate antennas on different towers which you may or may not have. starting with a k3 as radio 1 is solid though, the IF filtering on that thing helps a lot with adjacent radio interference.

i tried SO2R for the first time in cqww last year and tbh i made a mess of it lol. had two radios going but i kept losing my run frequency on radio 1 because i was so focused on tuning around on radio 2 that i forgot to keep sending CQ. ended up just turning the second radio off halfway through and going back to single radio. probably cost me more QSOs than it made me.

think the lesson for me was you really have to practice the divided attention thing outside of a contest first, like just get comfortable monitoring two bands casually before you try to do it competitively. also footswitch for PTT is kind of mandatory if youre doing phone, you cant be reaching for two different transmit buttons under pressure. anyway your instinct about the dead air is probably right, that was my problem too before anything else