so ive been running my IC-7300 for about two years now and always kind of lived with the stock oscillator drift issue, especially on digital modes like FT8 where you really notice it after the rig warms up. been reading about the TCXO-15 upgrade for a while and finally pulled the trigger last month.

installation was pretty straightforward honestly, took maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself before touching anything. the board layout is pretty accessible once you get the top cover off and you can see exactly where it drops in. no soldering required which is nice.

the difference on JS8Call and WSPR is noticeable to me — drift on WSPR went from like +-2 or 3 Hz over a 2 minute transmission down to basically nothing. but my buddy who hasnt done the mod keeps saying his stock radio does fine and i'm overthinking it. maybe i had a particularly bad unit to start with? curious if others have done this and actually measured before and after rather than just going by feel

I did the same mod on mine about a year ago and yeah the drift improvement is real, not placebo. I actually logged some WSPR spots before and after and the frequency stability was measurably better. The stock oscillator on those radios is decent but it's spec'd at something like +-0.5ppm which sounds fine until you're doing two-way coherent digital stuff or trying to run WSPR unattended overnight while temps change in the shack.

Your buddy's radio might just be a better sample from the factory, there's definitely unit to unit variation. Or he's not looking closely enough. Either way the TCXO is cheap insurance for digital ops and I'd do it again without hesitation. Also if you haven't already, worth checking whether your CAT control polling rate is adding any timing jitter on top of everything — took me forever to figure out that was messing with my JS8Call decodes more than the oscillator was.

not to derail but did you do anything about the fan noise while you had it open? i keep meaning to swap mine out for something quieter, the stock fan on my 7300 is driving me nuts during long digital mode sessions. figure if im already in there might as well do both at once but havent pulled the trigger yet