so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now coming from an old Kenwood TS-440S that i ran for like 15 years so take my impressions with that grain of salt i guess. first thing that hit me was just how different the whole SDR-based receiver feels, like i could actually see signals on the waterfall before i even heard them and that took some getting used to honestly. the 440 i just kind of tuned by ear and muscle memory so this is a different workflow.

the built in ATU handles my off-center fed dipole pretty well though it struggles a bit at the edges of 40m when conditions are weird, not sure if thats the antenna or the tuner or just propagation being propagation. audio out of the speaker is way better than i expected for a desktop rig, not tinny at all.

one thing that threw me off is the touch screen in a cold shack — i have an unheated garage setup and my fingers apparently stop working below 50 degrees which makes tuning around in the winter kind of annoying. probably a me problem. anyway just wanted to share since i saw a lot of people asking about this radio and most reviews are from youtubers who use it for like three days and call it a comprehensive review

yeah the cold shack touchscreen thing is real, i had the same issue and ended up just using the main dial and the multi knob for most stuff instead of poking at the screen. you get used to working around it. also the ATU on the 7300 is decent but its not gonna be happy with really bad mismatches, if you're regularly hitting the edges of bands with a wonky feedpoint impedance you might be better off with an external tuner and just bypassing the internal one. LDG makes some decent stuff that pairs well with Icom rigs.

the waterfall really does change how you operate, took me probably a month before i stopped treating it like a toy and actually started using it tactically for finding open frequencies. now i cant imagine going back to a radio without it.

ive been eyeing the 7300 for a while but keep talking myself out of it cause my 7200 still works fine. how does the receiver hold up on 40m at night when its crowded, thats always where i feel like my setup falls apart with strong adjacent signals