so ive been contesting for maybe 4 years now mostly single op on 20 and 40 and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this ceiling where i just cant squeeze more Qs out of an hour. running somewhere around 120-130/hr on a good day during something like SS or CQWW and i know guys with similar antennas doing 160+ pretty consistently.

been reading a lot about SO2R and i get the concept, radio 1 runs a freq and radio 2 is hunting mults or S&P while the other is in a pileup or whatever. but in practice it seems like there's a ton of setup overhead - station interlocks, bandpass filters, keeping the two radios from blowing each other up, N1MM configs, all of it. my current setup is an IC-7300 and a borrowed K3 i had for a while but dont have anymore so even hardware-wise im not quite there.

what i'm really wondering is whether the rate gains are actually worth it for someone who doesnt operate 48 hours straight every contest. like if im only putting in 20-24 hours does SO2R still make sense or is it more of a full-time contester thing. also curious if anyone found ways to improve rate WITHOUT going SO2R because i feel like my CQing technique and when i decide to S&P vs run is probably suboptimal and thats maybe a bigger factor than i think

honest answer - for 20-24 hour efforts SO2R helps but its probably not the biggest lever you can pull. the guys i know who jumped from 130 to 160+ without SO2R mostly did it by getting more disciplined about when they abandon a run freq. like theres this tendency to sit on a dying frequency because youre comfortable there and youve already defended it, but if your rate drops below like 60-70/hr for more than 5-6 minutes youre probably better off moving up or down a bit or flipping to S&P for a cycle and coming back.

also exchange speed is huge and people underestimate it. if youre fumbling the exchange at all or doing unnecessary fills thats killing your rate more than anything. practice sending and receiving until its totally automatic, not just fast but like zero cognitive load fast.

SO2R is real and the gains are real but the setup cost is also real. you need at minimum good bandpass filters (the 4O3A or Array Solutions stuff), a proper interlock so you dont TX on both simultaneously, and honestly a second antenna system ideally on a different band so you're not trying to share the same yagi. its a whole project. worth it eventually but maybe not the first thing to fix

yeah what he said about abandoning freq is spot on. i spent way too long early on babysitting dead runs because i thought id worked hard to get the frequency and didnt want to give it up. that thinking costs you points.

one thing that helped me a lot that nobody talks about enough is just logging practice outside of actual contests. like fire up a recorded contest audio file and just practice copying calls and sending exchanges until your brain stops having to think about it. when the exchange is automatic you can actually be listening for the next caller while youre finishing sending to the current one, and that overlap is where rate lives.

as for SO2R i tried it once with a pretty janky setup and it was more distraction than help honestly. i think unless your station is really dialed in for it the mental overhead eats into the gains. maybe someday when i have a proper two radio setup with separate antennas but for now im just trying to be really efficient with one