so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. my 7300 suddenly decided it only wants to do about 18-22 watts regardless of what i set the RF power to. doesnt matter if im on 40m or 10m, SSB or CW, just caps out around there. the ALC meter looks normal, not pegged or anything weird, and ive already factory reset the radio thinking maybe some setting got corrupted somehow.

thing is it happened kind of gradually i think? like i noticed i wasnt getting the signal reports i used to and then actually put a wattmeter on it and yeah, way down from 100w. the finals maybe? i really dont want to ship it to icom because last time that took like 6 weeks and cost more than i expected. wondering if anyone has seen this before or has an idea where to even start poking around before i give up and send it in.

had almost the exact same thing on mine a while back. before you do anything else, check the PA bias current. on the 7300 the finals can thermally drift and if the bias is off it'll limit your output pretty dramatically without throwing any obvious errors. there's a service menu you can get into, i'd look up the service manual procedure for the PA adjustment — it's not super complicated if you're comfortable with a multimeter and just taking your time.

also worth checking is whether the driver stage is putting out correctly before the PA. if you can get a scope on the signal path you can kind of narrow down whether it's the driver board or the PA board itself. mine turned out to be a bias issue and i got it back to full power without touching the finals at all. cant promise thats your problem but id start there before assuming the transistors are cooked.

is it running hot at all? mine did something similar after a really long contest weekend and it turned out the thermal pad on one of the PA transistors had kind of shifted and it was going into thermal limiting way earlier than it should. not saying thats definitely it but worth feeling around the heatsink area after a transmission and seeing if anything seems unevenly hot.