so i've been running an old Kenwood TS-570 for like 8 years and it's been totally fine but i kept seeing people talk about the 7300 and eventually i just caved and bought one used off QRZ classifieds. paid about 950 for it which i think was fair given it came with the original box and looked barely touched.

anyway couple weeks in and i have some thoughts. the waterfall display is genuinely useful and not just a gimmick like i expected it to be — i actually find myself hunting for signals visually now which i never did before. the receiver feels a bit different from the Kenwood, not sure if better or worse exactly, just different. maybe slightly quieter on 40m but that could also be band conditions, hard to say.

one thing that's bugging me is the menu system, there's a ton of stuff buried in there and the touchscreen is responsive but it's small and i keep hitting the wrong thing. probably just need more time with it. anybody else found stuff in the menus that's actually worth messing with or are most of the defaults fine to leave alone?

the defaults are mostly fine to start but there's a few things worth digging into. the NR and NB settings are set pretty conservatively out of the box, and if you're on a noisy suburban lot like me you might want to play with the noise blanker level depending on what's causing the noise. also check your RF gain — a lot of people leave it maxed and then wonder why the band sounds rough.

one thing i always do on a new 7300 is go into the scope settings and set the waterfall speed and reference level to something that makes sense for your noise floor. takes like 5 minutes and makes the whole display way more readable. other than that yeah the defaults are decent, icom did a reasonable job there.

950 is a solid price if it's in good shape. ive been on the fence about upgrading from my 7200 for a while and the main thing holding me back is honestly just that the 7200 still works fine and i feel werid spending money when nothing is actually broken lol. but the waterfall thing you mentioned is exactly what makes me want one, seems like it changed how people actually operate