Michael Thomas

I had something similar with my 7300 about a year after I got it. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the PA board, one of the driver transistor pins. wasnt obvious visually, had to use a magnifier and even then it was a tiny hairline crack. reflowed it and its been solid since. might be worth pulling the covers and having a close look before you send it anywhere, especially if the warranty is basically done. the board layout is pretty accessible once you get the lid off, just take your time with the connectors.
that said yours sounds a bit different because mine would drop and not recover at all, not bounce back on power cycle. could also be the temperature protection circuit getting a false trigger somehow, theres a thermistor in there that feeds back to the processor. if its reading high for some reason the rig will throttle back even if the PA isnt actually hot.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly lurk on some of the local nets and occasionally make a few contacts on 40m when im feeling brave enough. one thing that keeps tripping me up is all the shorthand people use. like i get that 73 means best regards or whatever but then someone will throw out QRM or QSB or say something like OM and im just sitting there going okay what does that even mean.
i found a list online but there were like hundreds of Q codes on it and i honestly dont know which ones people actually use versus which ones are just historical or whatever. is there like a short list of the ones that actually come up in normal conversation? also are some of them more CW specific or do people use the same ones on phone too. sorry if this is a basic question i just feel like everyone assumes you already know this stuff

yeah what he said about hamstudy is pretty much the standard advice you'll get. one thing i'll add is dont skip the electrical math questions even if they seem hard, theres actually only a handful of formulas they test on and once you do each type a couple times they stick. power = voltage times current, ohms law, that kind of thing. the decibel questions honestly just memorize that 3dB is double and 10dB is ten times, that covers most of what they ask.
i took mine at a club session last spring and the actual exam felt way easier than i expected after practicing. i think i second-guessed myself more than anything.

yeah the single yagi thing is real but there's a big asterisk on it. you can absolutely complete contacts on JT65B with a single long yagi like a 15-17el and 100-200w but you're basically dependent on the other station being a big gun. someone with a 4x yagi array or a 3m dish can hear you just fine when you're pointing at the moon, but you're not gonna hear them unless the geometry is good and everything lines up. the weak link is almost always your receive side.
the IC-9700 is actually a solid radio for this, good noise figure and the built in SDR stuff helps. what you really want to focus on first is a good preamp at the feedpoint, like an SSB Electronic or a Kuhne, something with a noise figure under 0.5 dB ideally. that single upgrade will do more for you than doubling your power output in a lot of cases. the path loss math is brutal but the JT65 modes really did open this up to stations that would have had zero chance in the CW days.
honestly just get yourself set up on 144.174 and watch the spots on the EME2 logger for a while before you even try transmitting. you'll get a feel for who's active and what kind of stations are making contacts on any given day.