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Icom IC-7300 HF Transceiver Review
- Thread starter Moleculo
- Start date
Check your source, the 7300 does not sound "GREAT" on A.M.
It's about average for a ricebox Amateur transmitter on A.M.
It's about average for a ricebox Amateur transmitter on A.M.
This IC-7300 will be my next radio. I don't care that it doesn't have 2m/70cm. I already have a fine 2m rig in the shack that I can monitor while fiddling with a HF rig. That's the way I like to operate.
I love my 7300, everything about it, I have a mint 781 and also a mint 746PRO. There's only one small detail I dislike from the 7300,....
The IC7300 remembers every setting per band, the ATU, pre-amps, NB, NR settings etc. Except for one...THE WATERFALL REF SETTINGS!!! While it takes only a few seconds to adjust, it is definitely a pain in the a** to have to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME you switch bands. That being an SDR, I'm hoping someone at Icom fixes this in the next firmware update (1.22??) so that the rig remembers the db settings for every band when it has been previously adjusted. I have been monitoring and writing down my settings per bands and they don't differ rarely from day to day or night vs. day,.. so it would be nice if I won't have to fiddle with this if let's say I'm on 20m CW, and a new DX pops up on the Cluster on 40m CW, and I would like to snatch it and go back to 20m right after without having to adjust this twice.
The IC7300 remembers every setting per band, the ATU, pre-amps, NB, NR settings etc. Except for one...THE WATERFALL REF SETTINGS!!! While it takes only a few seconds to adjust, it is definitely a pain in the a** to have to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME you switch bands. That being an SDR, I'm hoping someone at Icom fixes this in the next firmware update (1.22??) so that the rig remembers the db settings for every band when it has been previously adjusted. I have been monitoring and writing down my settings per bands and they don't differ rarely from day to day or night vs. day,.. so it would be nice if I won't have to fiddle with this if let's say I'm on 20m CW, and a new DX pops up on the Cluster on 40m CW, and I would like to snatch it and go back to 20m right after without having to adjust this twice.
WOW! $980 is an awesome price for such an incredible transceiver. Several locals purchased the 7300 when they first showed up. I think all went with a hiel. I don't recall the mic's model number, but one of the pr models. They all sound silky smooth. Low's, mid's, and highs sounded so very balanced. Even at the initial price of about $1300 that transciver was a big rig. At $980 it's even bigger. A member began a review on the 7300, and wrote it week to week as he used it. If I recall he had little to nothing bad to say about his experience operating it, and I wasn't surprised. sometimes looks can be misleading, but in the case of the 7300 i kind of got the feeling immediately that it was a lot of radio at a very fair price. I haven't been following up on the other three big companies or if they got into that hybrid SDR (sampling) type transceiver that the 7300 is. But if there are any newbies that want to start at the top in my opinion the 7300 can't be beat. Not at that price point. I actually asked a couple of the 7300 operators to switch over from their heil microphones to the fist mic that comes with the transceiver, and I was very impressed at the high audio quality coming from a hand-held microphone.. Of course it sounded much nicer with the 300 + dollar microphone, but even with the hand mic that comes stock with the 7300 the transceiver sounded incredible. I wouldn't be surprised if Icom sold hundreds of thousands of those transceivers. IdI like one myself, but I'm a chicken bander, and for me it's just too much radio to be used on (one band) 11 meters. It's like buying a Ferrari and never taking it out of first gear.I haven't read any reviews since that transceivers come out. I'm going to do so as I'm curious if icom made any improvements to the initial design. I can't imagine it getting any better, but as we all know technology moves along so quickly that I'm guessing it's possible it's even a better transceiver than it was the almost two and a half years ago that it was released.
That's interesting. I wrote my reply to this post before I read any others. and I failed to mention in my reply that all the locals that purchase them were using them strictly on SSB. My curiosity was peaked about how they sounded on a.m. . So I asked a couple of them to switch over to the am side. They accommodated me, and I must say that the 7300's I heard on am sounded poorly. I do know that HF transceivers can sound good on a.m., but it takes a bit of adjusting. I do know like most other HF transceivers they definitely need to be run at a very low output. And one usually needs to adjust the parametric EQ, if the particular transceiver actually has one. And most newer HFtransceive do have some kind of built-in EQ. Anyway as I was saying the two operators I asked to switch over to the a.m. side did so, and I did not like the way it sounded on am at all. On SSB it was a totally different story. Incredible sounding radio on SSB. With a studio mic, or even the stock and Mic that comes with the transceiver. I heard the transceivers with the heil microphones, and the stock and mic and the radio truly sounds terrific with either microphone. Of course it sounded better with a heil microphone, but I myself would have no problems operating one of those 7300 with the hand mic. I would imagine it that doing some adjusting one should be able to get the 7300 to sound fairly decent on a.m. . Switching from SSB straight to am without any adjusting would probably result in exactly the type of sound I heard on the am side. Which was very poor to say the least.
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