so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op single radio, and i keep reading about SO2R and how its basically required to be competitive at the top end. but honestly im not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze for someone who does maybe 4-5 contests a year and isnt really chasing plaques or anything, just trying to improve my scores year over year.

my current setup is an ic-7300 with a decent 3el yagi on 20 and a dipole for 40/80. nothing fancy. the idea of adding a second radio, second antenna system, dealing with RFI between them, buying a bunch of bandpass filters, figuring out the interlocking so i dont transmit on both at once... it sounds like a rabbit hole that never ends. i talked to a guy at the club who said he spent like 6 months sorting out his SO2R setup before it actually worked reliably.

what i really want to know is whether there are lower hanging fruit i should be going after first. like is my rate limited more by my antenna situation or my operating technique? i feel like i lose a ton of time in the slow hours just not knowing when to move vs when to stay and run. anyone have thoughts on when SO2R actually starts making sense vs just being a distraction

honestly for someone at your stage SO2R is probably not where i'd focus. the biggest rate killers i see with operators moving from casual to more serious contesting are almost always operating decisions, not hardware. knowing when to run vs S&P, how aggressively to move mults, when to give up on a pileup and come back later, that stuff probably accounts for more of your score than a second radio would at your activity level.

the antenna situation you described isnt bad at all for a regional score on 20/40. id spend time logging old contest recordings if you can find any, some guys post their N1MM logs and audio after big contests. just watching how a high rate operator handles band changes and mult chasing is pretty educational. SO2R makes sense when you've basically optimized everything else and you're leaving rate on the table during off-peak hours by not being able to search on one band while running on another. but if you dont have a run frequency nailed down and solid S&P discipline yet, a second radio wont save you

yeah the RFI thing alone almost made me give up on it. i run an ft-991a as my second radio and even with the dx engineering filters i still get some bleedover when both amps are going. its manageable but it took a while to get there. that said i do think it changed my scores noticeably in the longer sprints, like the 48 hour events where the slow 0200-0800 stretch would just kill me before. being able to dupe-check and snag mults on 15 while holding a run frequency on 20 is genuinely useful once the rate drops.

but my honest take is if your goal is improving year over year and you're not already pulling consistent 100+ hour rates during the good hours, fix that first. SO2R wont manufacture contacts out of thin air, it just helps you not waste the dead time. also the software side of it, getting the radio switching and the keyer interlocking right in N1MM, that really is a project. not impossible but dont underestimate it