so ive had my 7300 for about 3 years now and it's been rock solid but lately i noticed my signal reports dropping off and finally got around to putting a wattmeter inline and yeah, it's only doing like 30-35 watts on a good day when i've got it cranked to full. used to see a solid 95-100 out of it. nothing else has changed in the shack that i can tell, same coax, same antenna, same everything.

i did the obvious stuff, checked the ALC meter on screen and it looks normal, tried different bands and its the same story across all of them which makes me think it's not an antenna or feedline issue. RF power knob is all the way up. ran the built in auto-tune just to rule that out.

anyone dealt with this before? im wondering if its a PA transistor starting to go or maybe something in the driver stage. dont really want to ship it to icom if i can help it, i have a decent soldering iron and im comfortable poking around inside things but i dont want to make it worse without some direction first.

First thing I'd check before even cracking it open - what's your supply voltage actually doing under load? A lot of guys overlook this. If your power supply is sagging down to like 12.5 or lower when you key up, the finals will throttle back and you'll see exactly what you're describing. Stick a meter right at the radio's power connector while someone watches it during TX and see what it reads. I've seen switchers that measure fine at idle and then droop badly under RF load, especially if the caps inside are getting tired.

If voltage is solid - like 13.6 or better under load - then yeah you're probably looking at something in the PA chain. The RD70HVF1 finals in those radios aren't super expensive, maybe 15 bucks each if you source them right, but the labor is fiddly and you really want a service manual before you go digging around in there. Icom's out of warranty service isn't as brutal pricewise as you'd think either, just something to consider.

had almost the exact same thing happen on my 7300 last winter. turned out to be nothing dramatic - the RF power calibration had drifted somehow and i went into the adjustment menu and nudged it back. theres a service menu you can get into, there's instructions floating around on the forums if you search for it. i was skeptical it would do anything but i went from putting out 40 watts to back over 90 just from that.

worth trying before you start reflowing joints or swapping transistors anyway. might save you a headache.