so ive had this thing running for about three weeks now and figured id share some impressions since i spent way too long reading threads like this before i bought it. came from an old TS-450S that i inherited from a silent key uncle, which was a fine radio but the ergonomics were starting to drive me nuts and the filters were just not cutting it on a crowded 40m band.

the waterfall display is genuinely useful and not just a gimmick like i expected — i actually caught a weak DX station i would have completely scrolled past just scanning by ear. the built in tuner handles my end fed okay most of the time but it does give up on anything worse than like 3:1 which isnt great. RF gain staging feels really natural, way more intuitive than the Kenwood was.

main gripe so far is the fan. i run it in the shack which is a small back bedroom and on SSB when im pushing it the fan kicks on and its noticeable. not terrible but its there. also still figuring out all the menu stuff, some of it is buried pretty deep for no obvious reason.

anyway if anyone else is running one of these and has figured out a good starting point for the twin PBT settings on 40m phone id love to know what youre using, im still kinda guessing

congrats on the 7300, its a genuinely solid radio for the money. i ran one for about two years before i moved up to a 7610 and honestly i still kinda miss the simplicity of it.

for twin PBT on 40m phone i was usually running the inner passband shifted just slightly low and the outer maybe 200hz or so toward the high end — hard to give exact numbers because it really depends on where the QRM is sitting. what i found more useful honestly was just dropping the FIL1 bandwidth down to like 1.8k or even 1.6k when it gets messy, you lose a bit of the audio quality but the adjacent channel rejection gets much better. the DSP NR on that radio is pretty decent too, NR1 mode usually works better for voice than NR2 in my experience.

the fan thing is just the 7300 being the 7300, you kind of get used to it. some guys mod the fan with a quieter aftermarket one but i never bothered.

yeah the menu system on icom stuff does take some getting used to. been running mine for like 8 months and still occasionally find something ive never touched. the manual is actually worth reading though which i know sounds obvious but i never read manuals and it saved me a few times with this one.