so ive been sitting on doing this for probably 8 months now, kept telling myself id get to it. finally cracked it open last weekend. for anyone who hasnt done it on the IC-7300, its honestly not as scary as some of the threads on here make it sound. one jumper on the main board, took me maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent staring at the service manual trying to convince myself i was reading the right diagram.

what i actually wanted to talk about though is whether anyone has gone further and done any of the other mods while they had it open. ive seen some stuff about improving the TX audio by swapping out a capacitor somewhere near the mic input circuit but i cant find a consistent source on it - half the posts say it makes a noticeable difference and the other half say its placebo. my signal sounds fine to me but im always a little skeptical of my own ears when it comes to that stuff. also the rig runs pretty warm, wondering if anyone has done anything about that, better thermal pad or whatever.

not looking to go nuts with it, just curious what others have actually done versus just thought about doing

the TX audio cap mod you're talking about is probably the C931 thing, or something in that area depending on who wrote up the procedure. ive seen a few different versions floating around and yeah the results are inconsistent - i think a lot of it depends on your mic and how your audio was sitting to begin with. if you're already getting good reports its probably not worth the risk of lifting a pad for marginal improvement.

the heat thing is real though. i added a small heatsink to the PA transistors on mine after i noticed it was throttling slightly on long digital modes, just some thin aluminum and a bit of thermal adhesive. made a difference on FT8 sessions where im running it for a couple hours at a stretch. wouldnt call it a dramatic fix but it definitely runs cooler now. some guys just point a small fan at the back vents and call it a day which honestly works fine too.

did the same mod on mine last year, went fine. i did accidentaly touch a nearby component with the iron and had a mild panic attack for about 30 seconds before i realized nothing was damaged lol. just go slow and youll be ok.

not sure about the audio stuff, i mostly just run the rig stock other than the transmit unlock. my audio has always gotten decent reports so i never felt the need to mess with it. if it aint broke and all that