so ive been running an old FT-450D for about 4 years now and honestly it served me well but i kept hearing everyone talk about the 7300 and its waterfall display and i finally just bought one last month. figured id share some thoughts since i spent forever reading threads like this before i bought it.

first off the real-time spectrum scope is just as useful as people say, maybe more. i was skeptical because like how much do you really need to see the band visually when you can just spin the dial, but turns out it changes how you operate completely. i find myself just watching 40m for a few minutes and i can see exactly where activity is piling up before i even touch the tuning knob. found a pretty decent DX station last week just because i noticed a little cluster of signals forming around 7.155 or so.

the receiver itself feels noticeably cleaner to me than the 450D on crowded bands, though i know thats a pretty low bar. 20m last weekend during some contest i forget which one was just way more manageable with the roofing filter doing its thing. audio out of the built in speaker is actually decent enough that i havent bothered connecting my external speaker yet which surprises me.

only gripe so far is the menu system takes some getting used to. not terrible but not as intuitive as id like. also still figuring out the optimal settings for the NR and NB because i feel like ive been either running too much noise reduction and it sounds weird or not enough and the QRM is annoying. anyone have settings they landed on that work well for general HF use?

congrats on the 7300, its a solid radio. on the NR/NB question i basically leave NR around 3-4 for most operating and only crank it up if things get really bad. anything above 5 or 6 and voices start sounding kinda underwater to me, like that weird processing artifact. for NB i actually leave it off most of the time unless theres pulse noise like from a plasma TV or something nearby, because it can create its own artifacts on some signals. the notch filter though, the manual one, thats something i use constantly for that one carrier that always seems to show up on 40m in the evenings.

the spectrum scope thing you mentioned is real, i said the same thing to a buddy before i got mine and then felt dumb after because yeah it really does change how you approach a band. wait til you try it on 10m when the band opens, its almost exciting to watch.

ive had mine about 18 months and still finding little things. one thing that helped me with the menu weirdness is just spending an hour going through the quick menu setup and putting the stuff you actually touch all the time in there. took me way too long to figure that out. also if you do any digital modes the built in USB audio interface is pretty great, got FT8 running in maybe 20 minutes first time i tried it which was not my experience with previous radios let me tell you.