so ive been running a beat up old FT-450D for about three years now and its been fine but the waterfall is basically useless and i keep reading about how much better the 7300's SDR front end is for picking stuff out of the noise. found one locally for $850 with the original box and the guy says it has maybe 200 hours on it, no mods. seems like a decent deal but im not sure if thats the going rate right now or if i should try to talk him down a bit.

anyway the actual question i have is more about setup stuff. my shack is in a basement room and i've got a dedicated 20 amp circuit but i'm running a cheap power strip right now not an actual power distribution setup. the 450D never gave me any grief but i've heard some people have had weird issues with the 7300 and RF getting into the USB when they use it with a computer for things like wsjt-x. is that mostly a grounding thing or is it related to the ferrites on the cable? i have a few mix 31 clamp-ons sitting around and was wondering if thats enough or if i need to look at the whole station ground situation before i swap rigs.

also does anyone run one of these on a simple dipole setup and get decent results on 40 and 80 at night? i'm not expecting miracles just wondering if the receiver is noticeably better than the 450 for digging stuff out when the band gets noisy

$850 is pretty fair for a clean 7300 with the box, maybe not steal-of-the-century territory but its not getting ripped off either. i've seen them go anywhere from 750 to 950 depending on condition and accessories. if it comes with the DC cable and the mic its probably worth it at that price, if those are missing i'd maybe push back a little.

on the RF/USB thing, yeah its a real issue and almost always grounding related in my experience. the ferrites help but if your station ground isnt solid they're kind of just a bandaid. what i ended up doing was running a proper ground buss along the back of my operating desk, everything bonds to that, and then a short run to a ground rod outside. the mix 31 on the USB cable still stayed on but after i sorted the ground the problem basically went away on its own. also make sure you're not running the USB through a cheap hub, go direct to the computer if you can.

and yes the receiver on the 7300 is a genuine step up from the 450D especially on 40 at night when the band gets congested. the roofing filter situation is way better and you can actually use the waterfall to spot signals instead of just staring at noise. you'll notice it pretty quickly.

i ran mine for about a year just on a 40m inverted V and it was great honestly. 80 gets a little rough when the QRN is bad but thats more the antenna situation than the radio. the noise floor on the 7300 is low enough that you start to realize how much of your noise is actually coming in through the antenna and not the radio itself, which is kind of annoying because then you want to fix that too lol

the USB grounding thing bit me too when i first set it up for FT8. ended up being a ground loop between the radio and the laptop. just get a cheap USB isolator if the ferrites dont fix it, they're like $15 and save a lot of headache.