so ive been doing SS phone and CW for about 6 years now and every year i tell myself im going to set up a proper SO2R situation and every year i just end up running single radio because getting the second station sorted before the contest starts feels like too much work. this year i actually did it, had the FT-991A as the run radio on 20m and an old IC-7300 as the S&P radio mostly on 40 and 15, with a little bandpass filter setup i cobbled together from a dx engineering kit.

honestly the interference between the two radios was way less than i expected once i got the filters sorted out. the bigger problem was just the mental load of it. like i kept losing my run frequency because i was distracted tuning around on the second radio. i think my rate actually went DOWN in the first couple hours compared to what i normally do running single. it wasnt until maybe hour 4 or 5 that i started getting the hang of splitting my attention and then yeah the mults started piling up a lot faster.

anyway curious if anyone has tips for building up the SO2R mental skill faster, like is there some way to practice this outside of actual contests or do you just have to grind through a few events until your brain figures it out

yeah the mental split is absolutely the hardest part, took me probably 3 full contest weekends before it started feeling even close to natural. what helped me was forcing myself to use the second radio ONLY for mults at first, not just random S&P. like if the second radio isnt going to give me a new mult or a new section i havent worked yet, i leave it alone and focus on the run. that kept the distraction manageable and my run rate didnt tank as bad.

also the bandpass filters thing - what kit did you end up using? i had a nightmare with a 20/40 combo a while back where even with filters i was getting enough bleedover on SSB to confuse the DSP on my run radio. ended up having to add some additional common mode chokes on the feed lines before it cleaned up. the dx engineering 4-band sets are pretty solid but the 20m and 15m filters are real close in frequency and sometimes need a little extra help depending on your antenna situation.

I'm mostly a CW guy so take this for what it's worth but the thing that helped me with SO2R was actually just running VFO B on the same radio first before going full two-radio, just to get used to monitoring a second frequency mentally while still transmitting on the run freq. it's not the same thing obviously but it kind of trains your brain to track two signals at once without the added RF management headache. by the time i went proper SO2R i at least wasnt completely lost.

also dont underestimate how much logging software integration matters. i use N1MM and having it properly linked to both radios so the dupe checking is live across both was a huge deal, i was making a lot of dupes early on when i had them sort of half-integrated and that kills your rate just as much as losing your run freq does.