so ive been running an old TS-590SG for about four years and honestly never had a real reason to upgrade but my buddy kept going on about the 7300 and i finally caved and picked one up used off qrz classifieds last month. figured id share some thoughts since i spent way too long reading forum threads before i bought it and most of them were either fanboy stuff or from like 2017.

first thing that genuinely surprised me was how good the waterfall is in practice. i knew it had one obviously but actually using it on 40m at night when its busy, being able to just see where the pileups are and where the clear spots are... its a different way of operating and i dont think i fully appreciated that until i was sitting there with it. the 590 felt kind of blind after that.

the receiver itself is very good. not sure its night and day vs the 590 which also has a solid front end but on 160m with my inverted L i noticed it handles strong nearby signals better than i expected. could be placebo, hard to say without side by side testing.

one thing that did bother me, the menu system takes some getting used to. stuff is buried in weird places and the touch screen is fine but not great with cold fingers in my garage shack in january. small complaint but still.

anyway if anyones on the fence and has a chance to grab one used for a reasonable price i think its worth it. just my experience after about 6 weeks with it.

yeah the waterfall thing is real, i had almost the same reaction when i moved from a radio without one. you dont realize how much you were basically flying blind until you can actually see the band. took me maybe two weeks before i stopped thinking of it as a gimmick and started using it instinctively.

the menu thing is genuinely annoying and icom knows it. theres a few settings i had to look up on youtube because i couldnt find them any other way. once you get your commonly used stuff set up the way you want it you kinda stop going into the menus much though so it becomes less of an issue over time. the 590 has a nicer physical control layout imo but the 7300 makes up for it in other ways.

whats your antenna situation look like? im curious how it does with a real antenna vs just a dipole at low height, mine is up about 35 feet and it does pretty well but ive heard guys say it really opens up when you feed it something decent.

i looked at the 7300 for a while but ended up going with a used 7610 instead, the dual receivers sold me on it. for contest weekends its really nice to be able to monitor two bands at once. cost more obviously but i found a clean one for a price i couldnt walk away from. not saying the 7300 is a bad choice at all, for most operating its probably more than enough.