ok so ive been doing single op for years now and always done reasonably well in things like CQ WW and the sweepstakes, consistently pulling 800-900 QSOs in phone ss which im happy with but i keep reading about SO2R and watching videos of guys running two radios simultaneously and i genuinely cannot wrap my head around how you dont constantly get confused about which VFO youre tuned to or which radio is transmitting

my current setup is an IC-7300 and i just picked up a used TS-590SG so i technically have the hardware to try it but beyond just having two radios the interstation interference seems like it would be brutal, like how are you running 40 and 20 at the same time without one wiping out the other receiver, are people using band pass filters, separate antennas obviously but even then

also the rate optimization side of it - i get the theory, you S&P on radio 2 while youre running a frequency on radio 1, but in practice when do you actually switch focus, do you have some threshold like if your run rate drops below X per hour you start dedicating more attention to the second radio or is it more feel based

would love to hear from people actually doing this not just theorizing about it

the interstation interference thing is the real problem yeah, most serious SO2R guys use either a 2x2 bandpass filter setup like the Array Solutions or Dunestar filters, one set per radio, and you need them even if your antennas are on opposite sides of the property because at 100w into a dipole 50 feet away youre still going to front-end overload a modern radio pretty badly on adjacent bands

the mental side honestly just takes reps, what helped me was running the second radio completely muted at first and just practicing tuning it without audio, getting comfortable with the idea that radio 2 is always doing something even if youre not consciously managing it, then slowly bringing up the audio in the non-transmit ear, most people end up with mono audio from run radio in one ear and S&P audio in the other ear from a stereo headphone splitter or a dedicated SO2R box like the MK2R

rate threshold question - its feel more than anything, experienced ops kind of develop a sense of when the run frequency is drying up before it actually dies, like the pileup spacing changes, you start hearing dupes, thats when you get aggressive on radio 2, early in the contest though you should be running hard and only casually picking off new mults on radio 2, the math on rate vs multiplier tradeoff changes a lot as the contest goes on

i tried SO2R last CQ WW with a similar setup to yours, two modest radios and a homebrew bandpass filter I cobbled together from a design on the SM3SGP site, worked ok on 15/40 combo but 20/40 was still a mess for me, might just be my antenna situation though since both are inverted vees hung off the same mast

anyway what i found was that even doing SO2R badly is probably worth like 10-15% more QSOs than single radio if you stick with it, you miss stuff and make mistakes but you also catch multipliers on the second band during lulls that you would have completely missed otherwise, for sweepstakes specifically where its all about sections the mult hunting on radio 2 during a slow run is genuinely really useful

dont stress too much about doing it perfectly the first time, first contest with it i think i accidentally transmitted on the wrong radio like four times and probably confused some poor guy in VE3 land who got a partial call back from me