so ive been sitting on doing this for like a year because honestly i was scared to crack it open but finally bit the bullet last weekend. did the standard noise blanker tweak and also the preamp mod a bunch of guys on here have mentioned before. not the one from that sketchy pdf that was floating around a few years ago, the one linked from the icom modification registry site.

anyway the difference on 40m is pretty noticeable, especially late evening when the band is crowded. been running it for a few days now and no issues. the mod itself was pretty straightforward, just need a steady hand and the right size JIS screwdrivers or youre gonna strip something

anyone else done anything else to theirs worth mentioning? thinking about looking into the display brightness mod next because mine is weirdly dim compared to what ive seen in videos, not sure if thats a hardware thing or just my settings

yeah the JIS screwdriver thing is real, i used a regular phillips on mine the first time and regretted it almost immediately. had to order a proper set before i went back in. which preamp mod specifically did you do, the one that changes the front end impedance matching or something else? theres a couple floating around and they dont all do the same thing. the display thing is almost certainly settings by the way, there's a menu buried in there for rf gain vs sql display behavior that throws people off, worth digging through before you pull anything apart

i did something similar on my 7300 maybe two years ago now. the rx improvement on the lower hf bands is real, 160 and 80 especially for me. i was skeptical but a buddy of mine who runs a much more expensive setup could hear a difference in my audio reports so thats enough for me. only thing id say is document everything before you touch anything, take photos of every connector before you unplug it because the service manual diagrams are fine but not always obvious about which way the locking tabs face