so i had been running an old TS-570 for years and it did its job but i finally got tired of fighting with the IF filtering and just ordered a 7300 last month. been about 6 weeks with it now and thought id share some thoughts since i was reading these forums obsessively before i bought it

the waterfall is honestly better than i expected and worse than the youtube videos make it look, if that makes sense. in a quiet band it looks incredible but once things get noisy on 40m in the evening it turns into this kind of smear and you end up just using your ears anyway. still useful for spotting activity but its not magic

the thing that actually surprised me was the audio. i had read some complaints about the stock speaker being tinny and i figured people were just being picky but yeah its not great. grabbed a little external speaker i had sitting around from the 570 days and it made a real difference. nothing special, just an old Kenwood desk speaker, but the rx audio opened up a lot

one thing thats been bugging me and im not sure if its my setup or just how the radio works — on 20m i keep getting this faint repeating noise on certain frequencies, almost like a birdie or something internal. doesnt show up on my old rig so im wondering if its the SDR architecture doing something weird or if i have a grounding issue in the shack. the rig is bonded to my station ground but i havent checked the USB cable situation yet, i know that can cause issues

overall though im happy with it. the learning curve on the menus is real but not as bad as people say

the USB cable thing is almost certainly your problem with the birdies, or at least part of it. ferrite on the USB cable made a huge difference for me, i put a clamp-on about 6 inches from the radio end and another near the PC. also if youre running any kind of switching power supply near the rig that can do it too. the 7300 is sensitive to that stuff in a way the older analog rigs just werent because of the direct sampling architecture picking up everything

i went through like 3 weeks of chasing noise when i first set mine up. turned out it was a cheap wall wart for my router sitting too close to the power supply. moved it to the other side of the room and half my noise floor dropped. shack layout matters so much more with these SDR-based rigs

yeah the internal speaker is pretty bad, dont bother trying to live with it. i just use headphones most of the time when im doing serious operating anyway so it doesnt bother me much. the radio itself is solid, been running mine for like 3 years and only thing ive had to do is a firmware update here and there. enjoy it