so ive been running my 7300 stock for about two years now and honestly its been fine but i kept reading about the front end mod where you bypass or swap out the input filter components to squeeze a bit more sensitivity out of it especially on the higher HF bands. finally took the plunge last weekend and did the mod i found on that one guy's site — you know the one with all the icom teardowns.

results are... honestly mixed? i'm definitely hearing more on 10 and 12 meters but i also feel like the noise floor came up a tiny bit on 40 which is where i do most of my work. could be my imagination or could be i just stirred something else up when i had the thing open. solder work looked fine when i put it back together, no cold joints that i could see.

anybody else done front end work on the 7300 or similar radios? wondering if the tradeoff is worth it or if i should have just left well enough alone. also curious if theres a recalibration you're supposed to do after, the write-up i followed didnt mention anything but im second guessing myself now.

yeah the noise floor thing is pretty common after that mod, you're not imagining it. what you're gaining in sensitivity you sometimes give back in selectivity especially on crowded bands like 40. the stock filter on the 7300 is actually pretty well matched for general use so unless you're doing weak signal work on the high bands specifically it's kind of a wash in my experience.

as far as recalibration goes — yes you probably should run through the reference oscillator check at minimum just to make sure nothing drifted when you had the board warm from soldering. icom's service manual covers it and theres a hidden menu you can get into. it's not hard but you need a known reference, i use WWV for a sanity check first before anything else. if your display freq is off by more than a few hz from what you expect on a known signal that's your clue something needs touching up.

i did something similar on my 746 pro years ago and honestly kinda regretted it, not because it broke anything but just because the improvement was smaller than i expected and i spent like three hours with it open nervous the whole time lol. some of these radios are just well engineered from the factory and you're chasing marginal gains. that said if 10 meters is your thing and you're working weak DX i can see why you'd want every db you can get.