so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my IC-7300 for probably six months now, kept reading conflicting stuff about whether it actually degrades the finals over time or if thats just people being overcautious. finally just did it last weekend. took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and looking at the pcb with a flashlight.

for anyone who hasnt done it, its basically just moving a couple jumpers on the board to open up transmit outside the ham bands. i mostly wanted it for MARS and some EMCOMM stuff where we occasionally need to work just outside the edges. the radio came back up fine, alignment still looks good on the scope, no weird behavior on receive that i can tell.

what i actually wanted to ask is whether anyone has paired this with the other common mods — ive seen people talk about tweaking the mic gain defaults and messing with the TX bandwidth settings beyond what the menu exposes. not sure if thats a firmware thing or actual hardware. anyone gone down that rabbit hole

yeah i did the same mod on mine about two years ago, no issues at all since then. the finals on the 7300 are pretty robust, all that stuff about degrading them is mostly from people who dont understand that the mod itself doesnt change output power or duty cycle, you still have to not do anything stupid with it. the radio doesnt care that youre on 29.800 vs 29.750.

on your question about TX bandwidth — thats actually accessible through the set menu if you dig into it, theres a DATA MOD setting and you can push the bass/treble response further than the default SSB profile allows. its not a hardware thing. some people do external audio mods too like swapping the electret in certain mic setups but honestly the stock TX audio on the 7300 is already better than most rigs in its class, id mess with the software side first before touching anything physical.

i did the mod too but honestly i never use it lol. just wanted to know i could. the emcomm angle makes more sense as an actual reason to bother. one thing i'll say is take photos before you move anything, i was confident i remembered the jumper positions and i was wrong and spent an annoying 20 minutes figuring out which way things were supposed to go back if i changed my mind.