so i've had the 7300 sitting in the box for about three days now because i keep second guessing where to put it. my current setup is kind of a mess - old Kenwood TS-570 on a folding table in the corner of the spare bedroom, antenna tuner sort of shoved to the side, and all the coax runs are just kind of... draped everywhere. wife has been pretty patient but the room is also used as an office now so it needs to at least look like i thought about it.

anyway the 7300 is bigger than i expected physically, like i knew the dimensions but seeing it in person it feels more substantial. my question i guess is whether people run these with an external tuner or if the internal matcher is good enough for most situations. i'm on a G5RV cut for like 40m with a 4:1 balun at the feedpoint so it's not exactly a matched antenna on every band. also wondering if i should bother with an external monitor for the panadapter or just use the built in touchscreen - ive seen setups where people mirror it to a bigger display but is that actually useful or just cool looking

the internal ATU on the 7300 is fine for most stuff but it has limits, like if you're way off resonance it's just gonna give up and flash an error. for a G5RV you might be okay on some bands and fighting it on others depending on how your feedline length ended up. i ran mine into a pretty compromised doublet for a while and the internal tuner handled 40 and 20 no problem but 15 was a coin flip. ended up adding an LDG tuner in line and honestly it just made life easier.

on the monitor thing - i tried it for a few months with a cheap 1080p monitor mirrored over HDMI and it was genuinely useful for contesting where i wanted spectrum on one screen and logging software on another. day to day ragchewing though i barely glanced at it. depends what kind of operating you do i think.

congrats on the 7300, that radio is great. dont stress too much about the tuner situation right away, just hook it up and see what the SWR looks like on your bands before assuming you need external matching. sometimes people over-engineer the tuner thing before they even know if there's a problem.

for the shack layout honestly the best thing i ever did was get proper cable management - just like velcro ties and a decent length of cable raceway from the hardware store. took maybe two hours and the whole thing looked way more intentional. my wife actually commented on it which never happens with ham stuff lol