so ive been contesting seriously for maybe 3 years now, mostly CQWW and sweepstakes, and im starting to hit a wall with my single radio setup where i feel like im leaving a lot of points on the table during the slow periods. been reading about SO2R and watching some of the videos from the big gun guys but honestly the more i read the more i wonder if its actually worth setting up for someone doing like 12-15 hour efforts rather than the full 48.

my current setup is a k3 into a 4el yagi on 20 and a trapped vertical for the low bands. not exactly a superstation but i do ok. the idea of adding a second radio and dealing with all the filtering and keying interlock stuff just seems like a massive rabbit hole and im not sure the rate improvement justifies it for my category. like does anyone actually track their q-per-hour improvement after going SO2R or is it one of those things that sounds better than it is in practice

also curious how people handle the band change timing during a contest, like when do you pull the trigger on moving from 20 to 40 in the evening. i tend to stay on 20 too long and then 40 is already packed and i end up with terrible rate for an hour while everything settles.

honest answer: SO2R is absolutely worth it if you're doing any serious single-op effort, but the setup time and cost is real and you shouldn't underestimate it. the filtering situation alone took me probably 6 months to get dialed in, using a bandpass filter set and still dealing with some breakthrough on certain band combinations. the interlocking between radios so you dont transmit on both at once is critical and if you get that wrong you'll blow up something expensive.

that said once its working the rate improvement during slow periods is massive. you can be running on 20 while you're S&Ping on 15 for mults and the dead time just disappears. i'd say on a good contest weekend my claimed score went up maybe 25-30% after going SO2R but some of that was also just getting better at contesting in general so hard to separate out.

for your band timing question, i watch the cluster and set a threshold in my head, something like when i see more than 4-5 spots in a row going to 40 and my 20m rate drops under about 80/hr sustained, that's usually the signal. you can also just open a second rx on 40 during the last hour of 20 being good and listen for when it starts filling up, then you're already mentally ready to make the jump.

the band timing thing is something i struggled with for years. what finally helped me was keeping a rate sheet from past contests in the same conditions and just looking at when my rate historically collapsed on each band. turns out i had pretty consistent patterns once i looked at the data. now i basically have soft targets, like 20m usually starts dying for me around 0100z in november contests and i try to be already running on 40 by 0045 or so with a spot holding my freq if i can manage it.

on the SO2R question, i dont run it myself, my shack layout just doesnt support a second radio setup without a major reorganization that my wife would definitely have opinions about, but i've seen guys at club stations do it and the difference in mult hunting is night and day. even if you're not full SO2R you might get some of the benefit just by having a second receiver monitoring another band passively while you run on your primary. some of the newer radios have sub-receivers that can sort of do this if you're not transmitting on both.