so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id post something since i spent forever reading threads like this before buying. coming from an old TS-480SAT which i actually really liked but the panadapter situation was driving me crazy, always felt like i was flying blind on 40m during contests.

anyway the waterfall on the 7300 is just... yeah its as good as everyone says. took me a day or two to get the reference level and range set where i wanted it but once you dial that in its really intuitive. SSB audio out of the box is decent, not amazing, i spent some time in the menu tweaking the TX profile and got it sounding a lot better. the built in ATU is pretty basic, wont match a terrible antenna but its fine for stuff thats already close.

one thing nobody really warned me about is how deep the menus go. theres stuff in there i still havent figured out. the scope settings alone took me an afternoon. not complaining just saying dont expect to know the radio in a weekend.

my shack is pretty simple, radio on a desk shelf, LDG tuner for the end fed, a old heil headset im probably gonna replace, runs into a 100ft wire out the back. nothing fancy but its been working fine. got a few nice DX contacts on 17m already which the 480 never seemed to do as well on for whatever reason, maybe just propagation timing who knows.

anyone else using one with a noisy power supply? i noticed some hash on certain parts of the band and traced it to my cheap switching supply, switched to a linear and cleaned right up. probably obvious to most people here but took me longer than id like to admit.

yeah the switching PSU thing bites a lot of people, i went through two of them before just getting an Astron and being done with it. heavier but no more hash. the 7300 is pretty sensitive to that stuff.

the menu depth is real, i've had mine almost two years and still find things occasionally. the scope is worth learning thoroughly though, the mini scope in the corner during a QSO is actually really useful once you set the span right. i keep mine at like 50kHz so i can see if theres activity nearby without going back to the main display.

one thing i'd suggest is spend some time with the NR and NB settings if youre on 40m at night, they arent magic but with some tweaking they help with the usual noise mess on that band. enjoy the radio, its a solid rig for the money.

curious what TX profile settings you ended up with, im having trouble getting mine to not sound kinda thin on SSB. ive messed with the bass and treble a bit but feel like im just guessing at this point. also did you turn on the speech processor or leave it off?