Mike Johnson

yeah i was in the same spot about 8 months ago and just got the UV-5R. chirp was surprisingly easy, dont stress about it. the radio itself feels a little cheap but it works. only thing i'd say is make sure you get the genuine one from a real seller not some weird knockoff version, apparently theres a lot of those floating around.

so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this wall around 100-110 qsos/hr during the good runs and i cant figure out if the ceiling is me or my setup. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and honestly it seems like a massive rabbit hole before you even get to the operating part.
my current setup is an ic-7300 and a ft-891 that i use for mobile, so technically i have two radios but making them play nice without cooking each other or my ears seems like a whole separate project. ive seen guys running full SO2R with band decoders and antenna switching matrices and it looks more like an engineering project than a ham radio setup. is the rate improvement actually significant enough for a guy doing like 5-6 contests a year to justify that investment, or is this more of a serious competitor thing where you're trying to shave points off a top-10 finish?
also curious if anyone has opinions on whether improving CW speed or just working on S&P vs run strategy would give me more bang for the buck before i go down the SO2R rabbit hole. feels like there might be lower hanging fruit i'm missing.

honestly the extra sub-bands matter a lot more during contests than casual operating. if you ever get into contesting seriously youll notice real fast that the extra portion of 20m or 40m is where everyone is running stations and calling CQ, generals are kind of stuck listening to a pile of activity they cant transmit in. that alone was enough reason for me.
as for the theory stuff, yeah some of it is genuinely hard, the filter stuff and the transmission line calculations took me a few weeks of actual studying to wrap my head around. but i will say knowing that material made me a better troubleshooter when weird things started happening with my antenna setup. so its not totally useless knowledge even if you never design a bandpass filter from scratch in your life. just depends how deep into the hobby you want to go i guess.

i made that exact jump like two years ago and dont regret it but i'll be real the learning curve with SDRuno threw me off for a while. coming from SDR# it feels like someone designed the UI after staring at a rack of vintage test equipment. took me a weekend to figure out where everything was. once you get it dialed in though it's solid and the RSP1B handles MW and HF without any extra hardware which was the main thing for me. no more upconverter box sitting on the desk.

yeah i ran basically the same setup you're describing for a while, N1MM for contests and Log4OM for everything else. the ADIF transfers were annoying at first but once you get in the habit of exporting after every contest and importing into Log4OM its really not that bad, takes maybe two minutes. the duplicate checking in Log4OM will catch most of the obvious ones.
the WSJT-X integration with Log4OM works through UDP just like it does with N1MM, you just have to make sure you dont have both programs open and listening on the same port at the same time or you'll get weird behavior. i made that mistake once and ended up with some QSOs going into N1MM when i thought i was logging to Log4OM. just something to watch. overall though Log4OM is way nicer for day to day stuff, the cloudlog sync and the award tracking alone made it worth it for me

i have both sitting on my desk right now lol. use the rtl for aircraft because why waste the good one on ads-b, and the rsp1a for hf. the difference on 40m at night with a lot of broadcast interference is pretty dramatic honestly. the rtl would just kind of fall apart with the big signals around, rsp1a handles it way better. hackrf is a whole different thing if you ever want to transmit but thats another rabbit hole

yeah this sounds super familiar, had basically the same thing happening last winter. for me it turned out to be the ALC on the 7300 was creeping up mid-transmission and causing the signal to get sloppy enough that the gateway couldnt decode it cleanly anymore. vara would start the session fine because power was stable at first but then as things warmed up or whatever the ALC would kick in and mess up the waveform.
worth checking your RF power setting in the 7300 menu — for vara HF most people run it pretty conservatively, like 30-40 watts max, and you really dont want any ALC action at all. zero ALC is the goal. if your ALC meter is moving even a little during a vara transmission thats probably your culprit. also double check the USB send/recv levels in the radio's connectors menu, those can interact weirdly with winlink express's audio settings.
the timeout thing you mentioned is possible too but i'd rule out the RF quality issue first before digging into config files

Had identical issues with my EU2200i. Solution was a Corcom 20VR1 power line filter installed right at the generator outlet, plus moving the genny 100+ feet from my antenna. The switching frequency harmonics were coupling into everything. Night and day difference with proper filtering.