so this has been bugging me for a few weeks now. picked up a used 7300 off a local guy, he said it was 'working fine just needed a new owner' which yeah i know, red flag in hindsight. anyway it receives great, selectivity is good, all the DSP stuff works, but when i key up im only getting maybe 8-12 watts out regardless of what i set the power to. doesn't matter if im on 40m or 10m, same thing. ALC looks normal on the meter, at least i think it does, never had a 7300 before so im not 100% sure what normal looks like.

i pulled the covers and nothing looks obviously burnt or scorched. the finals look okay visually but i havent done any real measurements yet. my thought is maybe the driver stage is limiting it or something in the ALC feedback loop is clamping the output early. has anyone dug into one of these for a low power issue? im comfortable with a soldering iron and have a decent DMM and a scope, just dont want to go poking around blindly if someone already knows the usual suspects on this radio.

had almost the exact same problem on a friends 7300 last year. before you go digging into the driver or finals, check the menu setting for output power first — there's a separate power limit setting buried in the set menu that a lot of people dont realize exists. its not the front panel knob, its like a software cap. i forget exactly where it is offhand but its in there. the previous owner might have had it limited for some reason, apartment QRM complaints or whatever, and just never mentioned it.

if thats not it then yeah i'd start looking at the ALC line with a scope while keying up. the 7300 driver chain isnt too bad to trace once you have the service manual, which you can find floating around online. the PA transistors are Mitsubishi parts and they do fail but usually they fail harder than what youre describing. low and stable output like that usually points upstream of the finals in my experience.

check the RF power setting in the menu like the other guy said, that trips people up constantly. also worth doing is going into the diagnostics and running the internal checks if you havent already, the 7300 has a decent self-test mode that might throw a flag at something.

one more thing — what antenna or dummy load are you testing into? just want to rule out an impedance thing before assuming its the radio. had a guy in my club convinced his radio was broken for two weeks and it was a bad PL connector on his coax the whole time. SWR was spiking and the protection was pulling power back. the 7300 is pretty aggressive about protecting itself from a bad load.