so ive been sitting on doing this for like two years because i kept reading conflicting stuff about whether it would mess with the warranty or cause any actual RF issues and honestly i just bit the bullet last weekend. the mod itself is super straightforward if you follow the service manual procedure, just a couple jumpers on the main board. took me maybe 40 minutes including the time i spent triple checking i had the right board revision.

what i was NOT expecting is that the extended tx range on 60m is actually pretty useful for some of the emcomm stuff my club does, we occasionally need to work with some frequencies that the stock radio just wouldnt do cleanly. the ALC behavior outside the ham bands is a little different and you do have to watch your power levels more carefully, the radio kind of assumes youre not going out there so some of the protection logic is relaxed i think.

anyway if anyones been on the fence about it its not scary. just dont rush and make sure you document where you are before you touch anything. i took photos of every connector before i pulled it.

did the same thing on mine about a year ago. one thing i'd add is that the board revision matters a lot — i've seen guys with older units have slightly different jumper locations than what the common guides show online. if something looks off just stop and cross reference the actual icom service manual rather than just going off someones blog post. also after you close it back up do a full reset before you test anything, had a weird display glitch that went away after i did the two-button reset on startup.

the 60m thing is real useful though, agreed. our ARES group has been on some slightly off-band freqs for interop drills and it helps to not be fighting the radio.

whats the rx performance like outside the ham bands after the mod? thats actually more interesting to me than the tx side, ive been curious if the frontend filtering is any different in those extended ranges or if its basically the same. i do a lot of utility monitoring on the side with an sdr but itd be nice to just use the 7300 for some of that.