so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. we had a pretty bad storm roll through and i had everything unplugged except apparently i forgot the coax on my 7300 was still connected to the antenna switch. lightning hit somewhere nearby, not a direct strike but close enough that my neighbor's router got fried.

anyway ever since then the rig receives totally fine, audio sounds normal, SWR meter moves when i key up but power output reads zero or like 0.2 watts max on 20m. tried other bands same story. the ALC looks like its doing something when i transmit which is a little weird, almost like it's trying to fold back before the PA even gets going. finals maybe? or something upstream in the driver stage?

i pulled the top cover off and looked around for obvious scorching or anything that smells burnt, didnt find anything obvious. all the voltages on the main board look okay at a glance but i dont have schematics for this thing and icom's service manual situation is... not great let's say.

anybody dealt with this kind of partial damage before? wondering if its worth sending to icom or if someone local can dig into it. im in the mid-atlantic region if anyone knows a good shop.

yeah that ALC behavior is a pretty telling symptom actually. what you're describing sounds a lot like the driver stage took a hit rather than the finals themselves -- if the finals were gone you'd usually see different ALC response or sometimes the protection circuit just shuts everything down hard. the fact that it's showing *some* ALC movement but no power out is interesting.

the 7300 uses a two-stage PA setup and there's a driver transistor that feeds the finals, if that thing is partially damaged it can do exactly what youre seeing. still biasing up enough to make the ALC think something is happening but not actually delivering drive to the output stage. i'd be looking at the driver board before assuming the finals are toast, might be a cheaper fix than you think.

that said without the service manual its gonna be hard to probe around safely. icom does have a depot repair program and last i heard it wasnt insanely expensive for something like this, maybe worth a call to see what they quote. just make sure you tell them about the lightning event upfront so they know what they're looking at.

same thing happened to a buddy of mine with his 7300 couple years back, different cause but similar symptoms. his turned out to be a blown LP filter relay, of all things. rig was receiving fine, showed power on the meter briefly then dropped to nothing. relay contacts were partially fused i think. not saying thats your problem but worth keeping in mind its not always the obvious stuff.

also -- and i know this probably isnt what you want to hear -- icom service manuals for current production stuff are pretty locked down but there are some good folks over on the 7300 groups.io list who have done deep dives on the hardware. might be worth poking around there before you commit to shipping it anywhere.