ok so ive been doing single op for a few years now, mostly phone contests, did some CW last cycle and got serious about rate after watching some of the top scores come in. decided this year i was finally gonna try proper SO2R during the ARRL DX contest and honestly it went... mixed. like i had the radios set up, two amps, the band decoder doing its thing, but i kept fumbling the timing of when to actually fire up the second radio without stomping on my own run frequency.

what i found was that i kept losing my run QSO momentum because i was so focused on what was happening on radio 2 that id come back too slow on radio 1 and guys would move on. my rate ended up being maybe 10-15% better than last year which i guess is something but i expected more from SO2R. is there a mental model or a workflow that clicked for you guys when you first started doing it for real? like do you just S&P on 2 while running on 1, or are you actually CQing on both?

also running N1MM and the SO2R setup in there is fine but im still fumbling the Alt+Q and stuff when im tired. any advice appreciated, been chewing on this since the contest ended

yeah the timing thing is the hardest part and honestly it takes a full contest season before it starts to feel natural. what clicked for me was thinking of radio 2 as strictly opportunistic early on — youre not trying to run on it, youre just filling the dead air when youre waiting for someone to come back to you on radio 1. that gap between sending your call and waiting for the exchange is maybe 2-3 seconds and thats enough to spin the dial on 2 and snag a mult if you already know where one is sitting.

the mistake most people make starting out is they try to do too much on radio 2 and then yeah they miss their run frequency coming back. one thing that helped me was keeping a notepad (actual paper) with known mult freqs written down so i wasnt hunting blind on 2, just punching in the freq and listening for maybe one cycle then back to 1. once that reflex is drilled in your rate on radio 1 actually stays pretty stable because you learn how to split attention without losing the thread.

CQing on both simultaneously is a whole other level, i still dont do that reliably tbh

the N1MM keying config matters a lot more than people think for SO2R. make sure your focus follows PTT is set correctly otherwise you get that weird half-second lag where the software doesnt know which radio is active and you get the wrong audio in your ear at the wrong moment. drove me nuts for two contests before i figured that out.

also if you arent using headphone audio switching so each radio goes to a different ear that alone will help massively. running mono audio on SO2R is kind of brutal for your brain because you cant spatially separate what youre hearing