so ive had this thing for about three weeks now and figured id write up some impressions since i spent forever reading threads like this before buying. coming from an old TS-570 which honestly served me well for years but the display was starting to act weird and i wanted something with a built in scope.

first thing — the waterfall is genuinely useful, not just a gimmick like i half expected. picked up a few weak stations on 40m that i probably wouldve scrolled past before. the real time spectrum display takes some getting used to in terms of scaling but once you find settings that work for your band conditions its hard to go back.

audio out of the box is a bit harsh on SSB to my ears. ran through the menu and tweaked the treble roll-off and the TX bandwidth and its much better now. still havent dug into the contour filter much but thats next. rx sensitivity seems very good, no complaints there at all.

one thing that surprised me is how warm it runs. like noticeably warm on the top panel after a long digital session. not alarming but worth keeping in mind if your shack gets hot in summer. i've got mine elevated on some rubber feet with a gap underneath.

overall pretty happy. would probably buy again. anyone else running one of these and found menu settings worth sharing, especially for FT8

yeah the heat thing is real, mine does the same. i actually put a small 80mm fan on a shelf above it blowing gently across the top and it dropped the surface temp noticeably. icom probably figured the duty cycle on voice wouldnt push it that hard but FT8 at even 50 watts is basically continuous key-down every 15 seconds so it adds up.

for FT8 settings the big one is make sure your ALC is barely moving, like just kissing the bottom of the scale. a lot of people drive it too hard because they want the power but youre just creating splatter. i run mine at about 30w on FT8 and the IC-7300 is clean as a whistle at that level. also turn off the speech processor obviously, some people forget that.

the other thing i changed early on was the AGC. fast AGC on SSB in a contest environment is way more usable imo. default settings are fine for casual rag chew but once you start working a pileup youll want that tweak.

I made the same jump about a year ago, different starting point though — was on an FT-857 before so the jump to a proper base rig felt massive. The scope alone was worth it for me honestly. I spent probably a week just watching band openings on 10 and 15 without even transmitting, just seeing what propagation was actually doing visually made a lot of things click that I'd read about but never really internalized.

One menu thing that helped me — dig into the NR settings. The noise reduction on the 7300 is actually decent when conditions are rough, not perfect but better than I expected from DSP NR in that price range. Dont crank it to max though, it starts eating consonants on SSB voices which gets fatiguing fast. I usually sit around 5-7 on the NR level and leave it there.