so ive been doing contests for maybe 3-4 years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, sometimes dabble in 15 when conditions cooperate. been hearing a lot about SO2R setups and how much it can improve your rate but honestly every time i look into it i get overwhelmed by the station engineering side of things. the filtering alone seems like a nightmare if your antennas are close together.

my current setup is an IC-7300 and a secondhand TS-590SG that i picked up last year for exactly this reason but havent really committed to making it work properly. i tried running both during the last CQ WW phone and nearly blew my mind trying to manage the audio feeds and keep track of which radio was which. maybe im just not wired for it or maybe i havent found the right logging software integration yet. im running N1MM+ and i know it has SO2R support but the configuration took me an afternoon and still felt janky.

is there some point where the rate improvement actually shows up or is it really only worth it if youre already making like 150+ Qs an hour on radio 1 and you have dead time to fill? curious what people who actually use it regularly think, not looking for the "just try it" answer because i did try it and it was a mess lol

honest answer - SO2R doesnt really pay off until you've got the single radio discipline locked down pretty solid. like if youre still mentally working hard to find mults and manage your run frequency on one radio, adding a second one just splits your attention in a bad way and your rate on BOTH goes down. ive seen guys do worse in contests after adding the second radio because they were fighting the setup the whole time.

the way i think about it is radio 2 should basically run itself while youre doing real work on radio 1. so during a run on 20m, radio 2 is scanning for a new mult on 15 or whatever, and you only really touch it when something interesting pops up. N1MM has the SO2R assistant stuff and if you get the bandmap working right with a decent cluster feed it helps a lot. but yeah the audio thing is rough at first - i run headphones with SO2R audio in each ear and it took me probably 5 or 6 serious contest weekends before my brain stopped fighting it.

the filtering issue with the 7300 and 590 together is real btw. if your antennas are on the same band you need good bandpass filters or youre going to have a bad time. i use the Array Solutions stuff but its not cheap. for two different bands simultaneously its way more manageable.

I went through basically the same thing about two years ago. What finally made it click for me was just accepting that SO2R is a skill that takes time to build, not a hardware upgrade that magically improves your score. The first few contests you run it you will probably do worse than single radio, that's just kind of the deal.

One thing that helped me a lot was using the second radio strictly for search and pounce mults for a whole contest season before I tried to do anything more complicated with it. Like radio 1 is running, radio 2 is ONLY for grabbing a new country or a needed zone when one shows up. No trying to start a second run frequency, no trying to do fancy band changes. Just that one simple job. Once that felt natural I started doing more with it.

also the 590SG is actually a pretty decent SO2R radio if you get the IF-filter settings dialed in, the roofing filter on that thing handles adjacent interference better than the 7300 does in my experience so maybe run the 590 as your primary on the noisier band.