so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now coming from an old ft-450d that i ran for like 6 years and honestly the difference is kind of hard to put into words. the waterfall alone is worth the upgrade if you do any kind of band hunting because youre actually seeing whats happening instead of just tuning blind and hoping something pops up in your headphones.

real talk though the learning curve on the menus is a little rough at first, icom's menu system is just kind of its own thing and i kept accidentally changing stuff i didn't mean to. took me a solid weekend of messing around before i stopped feeling lost. the audio out of the box on receive was a little harsh to me, had to tweak the bass/treble a bit and turn the NR down from whatever default it ships at.

transmit audio reports have been really good, couple guys on 40m told me it sounded cleaner than what they were used to hearing from my old setup. running it into a MFJ tuner and a fan dipole in the attic. nothing fancy but its working. curious if anyone else went through a similar upgrade path or if youre running the 7300 and have any settings you swear by

yeah the waterfall on that radio is genuinely addictive, i found myself just watching it for like 20 minutes when i first got mine trying to identify what everything was. the built in scope really does change how you operate, at least it did for me.

for settings i run the TX bandwidth pretty wide on SSB, like around 2.4k, and i backed off the compression to almost nothing because i was getting reports that it sounded processed. if you havent already go into the set menu and mess with the AGC time constants, the default fast AGC on SSB was bothering me on strong signals. slow AGC feels way more natural to my ear. also make sure you updated the firmware if you havent, theres been a few revisions that fixed some minor things.

attic dipole is totally workable by the way, dont let anyone give you grief about it. ive worked europe on 40 from worse situations

im in pretty much the same boat came from a much older rig and the 7300 felt like jumping about 15 years forward overnight. the scope thing is huge yeah. one thing i will say is the stock mic that ships with it is kind of mediocre, swapped mine out for an SM-30 desk mic after a few weeks and it made a noticeable difference at least to me. might just be placebo but the reports got better so who knows