so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id write up some thoughts since i spent forever reading posts like this before buying it. came from an old FT-450D which served me well but the waterfall on that thing is basically useless and i was getting jealous watching other people's screens on youtube.

first thing i noticed is the receive is noticeably better, especially on 40m at night when its a wall of noise down here. the real-time spectrum scope is just genuinely useful, not a gimmick like i was half expecting. found a few stations i would have totally missed just scanning by ear. the touchscreen takes some getting used to and i keep accidentally changing things when im trying to adjust the mic gain but thats probably a me problem.

one thing that bugged me out of the box was the TX audio, a few guys on 20m said i sounded a bit thin or processed. spent an hour going through the menu settings and found the TX bandwidth was set narrow for some reason, maybe a default thing. opened it up a bit and got much better reports after that. nobody told me to check that anywhere in the getting started stuff so just flagging it for anyone else.

overall really happy with it. the only thing i genuinely miss is the dedicated buttons on the 450 for things i used constantly, you do end up menu diving more on the 7300 than id like. but not a dealbreaker by any stretch.

yeah the TX bandwidth thing catches a lot of people out, icom sets it conservatively from the factory i think. glad you sorted it. i ran a 7300 for about two years before moving to the 7610 and honestly the 7300 punches well above its price, the only real limitation i ran into was serious contesting where the dual watch stuff on the 7610 matters. for everyday HF work the 7300 is hard to beat at that price point.

the touchscreen i never fully made peace with tbh. ended up programming most of my common settings into the function keys which helped a lot. worth spending an afternoon on that if you havent.

im in a similar boat, been eyeing the 7300 for months and keep going back and forth between that and the FT-991A mainly because i also do some VHF/UHF and the 991A covers all that in one box. but everyone seems to say the HF performance on the 7300 is just better so maybe i should stop trying to do everything with one radio. does yours handle digital modes okay, like wsjt-x and stuff? thats kind of important for me too