so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 started dropping receive audio intermittently, like it just goes completely silent for anywhere from two seconds to maybe half a minute then comes back like nothing happened. transmit seems fine, i can hit a repeater and people hear me no problem, and the s-meter is still moving when it's 'deaf' so it's definitely receiving rf just not passing audio through.

already checked the obvious stuff — volume knob is fine, no mute function accidentally on, AF gain is where it always is. i swapped headphones thinking it was the jack but same thing on the internal speaker. did a full reset twice and it came back within a day both times. firmware is current.

im starting to wonder if it's thermal — it seems worse after the rig has been on for an hour or more but i haven't been systematic enough about it to say that for sure. has anyone seen anything like this on a 7300 or know what i should even be looking at on the board? i'm decent with a soldering iron but i've never been inside one of these SDR-based rigs before and i'm not sure how much is serviceable vs just swap the board.

the thermal angle is worth chasing before you go digging into the board. what i'd do first is just let it run until it acts up, then hit it with some freeze spray in sections — work your way around methodically rather than just blasting the whole thing. if the audio snaps back when you hit a particular area you've at least narrowed it down to a general region. could be a cold joint on the audio amp section or even something on the main board near the DSP.

i had a similar intermittent on an older Kenwood years ago that drove me crazy for months, turned out to be a cracked solder joint on a filter cap that only opened up when warm. visually looked totally fine. had to reflow about a dozen joints in that area before i hit the right one. not fun but fixable.

on the 7300 specifically i dont know that board well enough to point you at a specific component but there's a guy on one of the Icom groups who does board-level repair on these and posts pretty detailed teardown stuff. worth searching before you go in blind.

might be worth checking if icom has any service bulletins on this, i vaguely remember something about audio path issues on early production runs but i could be mixing that up with a different model. if it's still under warranty obviously send it in, icom's turnaround isn't terrible.