so ive had this thing for about three weeks now and figured id post something since i spent forever reading other peoples impressions before buying. coming from an old ft-857d that i was using as a base which... yeah i know, not ideal but it worked.

the waterfall alone was worth it honestly. i know everyone says that and it sounds like marketing speak but when youre actually sitting there tuning around 40m at night and you can just see whats going on across the whole band its genuinely different. found a couple dx stations i would have completely scrolled past before.

main thing i wasnt expecting was how much i had to mess with the settings out of the box. the default TX audio profile did not sound great on my voice, had to spend a couple evenings tweaking the parametric eq and the bass/treble to get reports that werent just 'you sound a bit muffled'. not a complaint really just wasnt expecting it to need that much work upfront.

RF direct sampling is interesting, still trying to fully wrap my head around what that means practically vs what i had before. receiver sensitivity seems noticeably better on 17 and 12 meters compared to the 857 but im not sure how much of that is the radio vs my antenna situation changed slightly when i remounted stuff last month.

anyway if anyones on the fence and been running something older, it feels like a real upgrade. not groundbreaking in any single area but the whole package is just... cleaner. shack looks tidier too which my wife appreciated

the TX audio thing is real, took me a while too. what mic are you using? i found the stock HM-219 was part of my problem, switched to an SM-50 on a desk stand and it helped a lot before i even touched the EQ settings. though honestly once you get the parametric dialed in most mics work pretty well with it.

one thing worth doing if you havent already — look up the N4PY or W4MQ audio settings people have posted, gives you a solid starting point instead of tweaking blind. i think there was a thread on eham a while back too but cant remember if those numbers are still considered good or if the firmware updates changed anything.

yeah the waterfall sold me too when i was demoing one at the club. still running my 746 pro because i just cant justify the spend right now but every time i use someone elses 7300 at a field day or whatever i get a little jealous. the direct sampling architecture is basically why the rx is so good on those higher HF bands, youre not going through the same conversion stages as a traditional superhet so theres less noise introduced early in the chain. or thats my understanding anyway, im sure someone will correct me