so after about two years of running an old Kenwood TS-440 that i inherited from my uncle i finally ordered an IC-7300 last week and it just showed up yesterday. been reading the manual but honestly the thing is kind of overwhelming compared to what im used to. the 440 was dead simple, you knew where everything was.

anyway my main thing right now is i have a G5RV up about 30 feet fed with some old ladder line into a manual tuner and i know the 7300 has a built in tuner but i dont think itll handle the impedance swing on ladder line right? so im assuming i still use the external tuner and just bypass the internal one. also wondering if anyone has opinions on the scope, like is it actually useful day to day or do you mostly ignore it after the novelty wears off. and the audio on this thing out of the box sounds way better than i expected honestly

yeah you're right about the tuner, the internal one on the 7300 is only rated for like a 3:1 SWR range which is fine for a resonant antenna with coax but its not gonna do anything useful with ladder line into a balanced tuner situation. keep your external tuner in the chain, i'd actually just run the radio straight into the tuner and skip the internal one entirely, less stuff in the path.

as for the scope i use mine constantly, mostly for finding signals before i even touch the VFO. on 40m at night when things get crowded its actually really handy to see where the activity is bunched up. took me maybe a week to stop ignoring it and now i'd miss it. the waterfall persistence setting makes a big difference, default is kind of aggressive i think, play with it.

congrats on the 7300, i made the same jump a couple years ago from an older rig and yeah the learning curve on the touchscreen menus is real but you get used to it fast. one thing i wish someone told me early on is go into the settings and mess with the RF/SQL knob behavior because the defaults felt weird to me. also the receive audio really does slap compared to what most people expect from a radio in that price range, not just you.