so ive had my TS-590SG for going on 7 years now and honestly it still works great, no complaints really, but i keep reading about the IC-7300 and the IC-7610 and the new Icom stuff and wondering if im missing out. the SDR waterfall display stuff looks really useful for contesting and just general DX hunting.

my shack is pretty basic — 590 into a LDG tuner, 100w into a fan dipole up about 35 feet, nothing fancy. i work mostly 40 and 20m, some 17m when the band cooperates. i do a handful of contests a year, nothing serious, and just ragchew otherwise.

the question is whether the 7300 is actually a meaningful upgrade from the 590 or if im just falling for the shiny new thing. receiver wise is there actually a noticeable difference day to day or is this one of those things that only matters if youre in a competitive contest environment with big antennas. i keep going back and forth on this honestly

honestly the 590SG is still a really solid receiver, like genuinely competitive even today. the 7300 is great but the hype around it is partly because it brought SDR touchscreen stuff to that price point when it came out — the actual receive performance difference between those two is not huge in practical terms. where the 7300 wins is the panadapter, which yeah, once you use it you do miss it when its gone.

if you mostly ragchew and do light contesting with a dipole at 35 feet the 590 is not holding you back. now if you had a stack of yagis and were doing serious SO2R stuff then maybe the conversation is different but for your setup i'd sit on the money or put it toward a better antenna before a new rig. that fan dipole going from 35 to 50 feet would probably do more for you than swapping radios.

i went from a 590 to a 7300 about two years ago and the waterfall really does change how you operate, like i find stuff i would have just tuned past before. that said my buddy runs a 590SG and we're usually close on signal reports so i dont think its a night and day recieve thing. the touchscreen on the 7300 takes getting used to, sometimes i still accidentally bump settings mid-qso which is annoying.

the 7610 is a noticably better radio than the 7300 if you can stretch the budget, dual watch is actually useful not just a gimmick. but thats a bigger jump in price obivously.