so i've been on the waitlist at my local dealer since like early spring and they finally called me yesterday saying the IC-7760 came in. i havent picked it up yet because honestly im a little nervous about dropping that kind of money right now but i've been watching the unboxing videos and reading everything i can find on it. the remote head thing is really what sold me on it originally — i've got a weird shack setup where the radio has to kind of be around a corner from where i actually sit and my current cable run for the IC-7300 is already kind of a mess.

also on a totally different note, 10 meters has been absolutely wild this week. worked a bunch of south american stations Tuesday evening with like 100 watts and a dipole that is definitely not optimized for that band. solar flux has been up there lately and i feel like a lot of newer hams might not even realize this is what a real solar max feels like. if you havent tried 10 or 12 lately you might want to dust off whatever antenna you have pointing that direction.

anyway has anyone actually gotten their hands on the 7760 yet or is it still pretty scarce out there? curious what people think of it compared to the 7300 since thats my only real reference point for Icom rigs.

ive had mine for about three weeks now and honestly the remote head is even better than i expected. ran the cable through the wall into the next room and it works great, very clean setup. coming from a 7300 the jump in receive performance is noticeable especially on crowded bands, 40 meters at night is a lot more manageable. the learning curve on the menus is real though, took me a good weekend to feel comfortable with everything. totally worth it if you can swing it financially but yeah its not a casual purchase

and yes 10 meters has been crazy good, worked into europe almost every morning last week just running 50 watts. its been a long time since the band felt like this and i keep telling people at our club to just try it, half of them got licensed in the solar minimum years and have never really seen 10 open up like this

oh man this is kind of timely because i literally just passed my general last month and somebody at my club meeting mentioned 10 meters being open and i had no idea what that even meant at first. i thought something was wrong with the band or like a repeater went down lol. had to look up what a band opening actually is and now i kind of cant stop reading about solar cycles and propagation which is a whole rabbit hole. havent made my first HF contact yet because i dont have an HF radio yet but im saving up. congrats on the new radio whenever you go pick it up