so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id share some stuff for anyone sitting on the fence about it. came from an old FT-450D which honestly served me pretty well for years but i was getting real tired of fussing with the filtering and the waterfall on that thing is basically useless compared to what the icom gives you.

first thing i noticed was how much easier it is to find activity on 40m at night, just watching the spectrum and clicking around is kind of addictive honestly. the built in ATU handles my off-center fed dipole reasonably well on most bands, had a bit of grief on 80m but i think thats more my feedline situation than the radio. audio out of the speaker sounds better than i expected for a shack radio, though i still run it into a little external speaker most of the time anyway.

the touch screen took some getting used to, a couple times i brushed it by accident and changed something while transmitting which was mildly embarrassing. also the menu system is deep, like really deep, i still stumble across settings i didnt know were there. overall though pretty happy with it, feels like a significant jump from where i was. anyone else running one of these with a compromised antenna setup?

yeah the waterfall alone is worth the upgrade from basically anything that came before it in that price range. i went through a similar thing when i moved from a 450D a few years back, the difference in band awareness is just night and day. on 80m with a compromise antenna you might want to look at what your SWR is doing before the ATU — if its seeing something really ugly it'll keep hunting and sometimes just give up. i had a loading coil issue on one of my verticals that looked fine on other radios but the icom's ATU just wouldnt commit to a match. worth checking if you havent already.

the accidental touchscreen thing happens to everyone at first, i ended up tweaking the screen sensitivity setting which helped a lot. its buried in the display settings somewhere, took me forever to find it the first time.

im in almost the exact same boat, got mine about two months ago and still discovering stuff in the menus. the scope is genuinely great for contesting too, being able to see a whole section of 20m and just pick off the multipliers visually is something i didnt realize id rely on so much. one thing i will say is the built in audio processing when you have it set up right really does make a difference on SSB, took me a while to dial in the TX EQ but worth spending an evening on it with a friend to give you reports.