For the most part, this guy is full of....
Old rigs can mostly be fixed by the owner. If that IC-7300 takes a poop, then you best have some advanced skills.
Yeah, but as it stands it probably won't, it seems to be pretty well built. I've had good luck with the gear I've bought over the past 2 decades or so, not having a single
newer radio I've bought go tits up on me.
As far as self repair goes, most people really don't have the full suite of crap/ability hanging around to perform even what I would call a level 1 repair on an old radio. Yeah, I can probably fix a bad speaker jack in an FT840 or something like that, sure, but as an example, my buddy's 756 Pro III is sitting on my floor waiting to get sent out
because something is gone in the PA that only causes it to put out 5W... I don't even know where to begin with that to diagnose and repair it. The whole thing is weird because he ran that thing for years without issue, went to go use it the other day and no output. Now, maybe if I had a dedicated electronic workbench in my house with enough gear, I would attempt diagnosing it and fixing it myself, given that compared to the rest of the radio, the PA section is pretty simple. (course getting parts is another
story... )
The "big deal" with the 7300 is the value prop. $1000ish. Tuner. Decent sounding radio. Comes with decent sounding hand mic (esp after you mod the mic). Has a noise blanker that actually works and doesn't distort the crap out of strong signals. Has an NR that actually helps sometimes. Has a stability TXCO already in the radio... that's a pretty tough card to beat. The only thing that lacks is the fact that
because its a small sized radio you're sawing logs in an ashtray, and could use an extra ATT level too. (would be nice if they did 6/12/20 ATT). That aside, most of the other radios in the 1K price class are kinda ghetto compared to the 7300.
That said, I do find some of it to be BS- I think older radio values at this point are more supported by collector/arbitrary/nostalgic status more than anything else, they could sell a 7300 for $600 and it's still not going to bring down the price of say, some guy selling a TS440SAT trashbox, a very nice looking and "feeling" radio that was actually crap by standards set out 15 years ago. I bet 3 years from now people will still be getting $400+ for those things on ebay if they're in good shape with the VCO working, they have a cult following to put it mildly. I had one and it was an OK radio, for its time, which is long gone. Especially seen recently there were like two TS450s and several 440s floating around on fleabay, the 450s werent much higher than the 440s were! That tells me that people buying the 440s are likely assigning some arbitrary value to them that has more to do with the vintage appeal of the
radio.
The biggest hits price wise are on the big radios, but that's pretty obvious, for a couple of reasons.... contesters etc dumping things like 781s or 1000Ds, etc, just want the radio to go away so they don't sit for it on months when they sell it, they list it at a good price and just let it go. There's also a value prop problem, because you have radios like the 7600 that show up used for like $1500 or less that make stuff like my venerable 775DSP look sad in comparison at everything outside of output power....
