so this has been driving me crazy for about two weeks now. we had a pretty bad storm come through, nothing hit my antenna directly as far as i can tell but i had everything connected and yeah i know i know, lesson learned. anyway after the storm the 7300 receives just fine, waterfall looks normal, i can hear stations no problem. but when i key up there's literally nothing coming out. the ALC meter moves a tiny bit, like maybe one bar, but RF power meter doesn't budge. PA TEMP reads fine, no fault codes showing up.

i pulled the top cover off and did a visual inspection and i cant see any obviously scorched components, no capacitors that look bad or anything. i did notice one of the small transistors near the PA section has what might be a hairline crack on the case but im not 100% sure if thats new or if it was always like that. i dont have a ton of surface mount rework experience but im comfortable with through-hole stuff and i have a decent DMM and an old analog scope.

anyone dealt with this specific failure mode on the 7300 or similar Icom rigs? trying to figure out if this is worth attempting myself or if i just bite the bullet and send it to the Icom service center. repair estimate i got was "probably around $300-400" which honestly might be worth it but id rather learn something if possible.

that hairline crack on the transistor case is almost certainly your problem right there, or at least part of it. the PA finals on the 7300 are the RD70HVF1s and they're not super expensive individually, maybe $15-20 each if you source them right, but the tricky part is they usually dont go alone. when one goes it often takes out the driver stage or blows something in the bias circuit. i'd check the bias voltage on the gate of those FETs before you do anything else — should be around 3-4V with no drive, if its zero or way off something upstream is cooked too.

also worth pulling the finals and doing a diode check on them out of circuit. if the transistor thats cracked reads shorted gate to drain you're replacing it for sure. the surface mount stuff around the PA isnt that bad honestly, the 7300's layout is pretty accessible compared to some older Icoms i've worked on. if you're careful and have hot air or at minimum a fine tip iron you can probably manage it. but if you've never done SMD before maybe get your feet wet on something cheaper first.

had something similar happen to a friends FT-991 after a nearby strike, ended up being the low pass filter board had a cap that looked totally fine visually but was shorted. TX path was basically dead, receive was perfect. just something else to check in case its not the finals.