so ive been sitting on this for a while but i finally pulled the trigger and did the front end mod on my 7300 — the one where you swap out the input attenuator resistors and mess with the preamp bias a bit. not gonna lie i was nervous about voiding the warranty but the thing is like 4 years old now so whatever.

the difference on 80m and 160m is actually noticeable, weaker stations that were kind of buried before are coming up a bit cleaner. not like night and day but definitely not placebo either, i A/B'd it against my buddies stock 7300 on the same antenna and yep something is there. 40m feels about the same honestly.

the one thing i didnt expect is it seems a little more prone to intermod now when the band is busy, which i guess makes sense if youre basically turning up the gain earlier in the chain. havent had it be a real problem yet but something to keep in mind if you run without a bandpass filter. anyway curious if anyone else has done similar stuff to theirs or if there are other mods worth looking at — ive seen some stuff about the TX low pass filters but havent gone down that rabbit hole yet

yeah the intermod thing is the tradeoff nobody talks about when they post these mods on youtube. you're basically moving the dynamic range problem around rather than solving it. if your noise floor is the limiting factor then yeah you gain something real, but if you're anywhere near a strong local signal or running a wideband antenna without filtering you'll start seeing spurs that weren't there before. i did something similar to an older 756 pro years back and ended up adding a little 2-pole bandpass switching setup in front of it which helped a lot. the 7300 has decent enough filtering built in but it's not a substitute for frontend selectivity when things get hairy on 80m contest weekends.

the TX lowpass stuff is honestly less exciting than people make it out to be unless you're measuring your harmonics and actually seeing a problem. stock harmonics on the 7300 are already well within spec from what ive seen on a spectrum analyzer. unless youre doing something weird with the power output or running it into a bad match id probably leave that alone.

curious which specific mod you followed, there are like three different versions floating around and i think some of them are for earlier hardware revisions and might not even apply to the later boards. i started going down this road a few months ago and kinda got lost in conflicting info. did you use the eham writeup or was it from one of the SDR forums?