so ive been doing single op for a few years now, usually top 20 in my section for the bigger contests which im reasonably happy with but i keep reading about SO2R and watching guys like n2ic and others talk about how much it changes your rate and im wondering if its actually worth the investment and complexity for someone who maybe does 6-8 contests a year seriously

my current setup is a k3s into a hexbeam and a separate 40m dipole so i technically have two antennas already, been thinking about picking up a used radio just to try running two bands at once but the filtering and switching stuff seems like it can get really deep really fast. like how much do you actually need to spend to not have the radios just totally trash each other? ive seen guys say you can do it on the cheap with a bandpass filter set and a relay box but ive also seen setups that look like they cost as much as a small car

also just generally curious what rate improvement people actually see in practice, not the theoretical stuff. does it really bump you up that much or is it more of a marginal thing unless youre already running elite level rates?

honest answer: it depends entirely on how disciplined you are operating it. the guys who see massive rate gains from SO2R are the ones who've spent years getting comfortable enough on one radio that they can basically run on autopilot, then the second radio is filling dead time instead of just creating chaos. if you're still having to consciously think about logging and your run frequency and your exchange then adding a second radio mostly just gives you more things to mess up

that said, for mid-level contesting the biggest gains i saw weren't even from running two bands simultaneously, it was more about using the second radio to find a clear freq before i QSYed and for S&P mults while i was running. that part alone probably added 5-8% to my score in a typical cqww. the bandpass filters are non-negotiable though if your antennas are anywhere close to each other, i used the Array Solutions ones for a while and they worked fine, you dont need the super fancy station master stuff unless you're doing really aggressive interleaving

the k3s is a great foundation for it too since the noise floor is low enough that youll actually hear stuff on the second radio even with some residual crud from the other band

i tried cobbling together a cheap SO2R setup last fall with my main rig and an old ft-950 i got off qrz classifieds for like 400 bucks and honestly the bandpass filter situation was more annoying than i expected even with the antennas on opposite sides of the property. 40 and 15 were okay but 20 and 10 running at the same time was rough, lots of desense on the older radio. ended up just using it mostly to spot mults which still helped but wasnt the full SO2R experience

think i need to actually invest in a proper filter setup before trying again. or just accept that im a SO1R guy lol