[Elecraft] A helpful review...

[Mike Smith VE9AA]

I had an IC-7300

.I just mailed it back to the company I bought it from.
This is the first radio I have ever sent back or traded back in – EVER.

 

>From a contesting perspective, it was no good for SO2R operations.  The OVF
(overload) light constantly flashed “indicating, hey, wait a minute, you
have very strong signals nearby and you had better stop or turn the RF gain
practically all the way down or risk damaging the rig.)
you can get rid of
the “danger danger Will Robinson”, OVF light but then you can hear hardly
anything.  I do operate SO2R at 100w WITHOUT filters or stubs, but my radio
2’s antenna is a horizontal, hundreds of feet away from my primary antennas
verticals. I have made measurements with oscilloscopes and have operated a
plethora of other (mostly ICOM) radios w/o any hint of an issue.

 

Worst part about all this was that it was NOT on a harmonic band at all ! !
! ! Ie: I could’ve lived with the fact that if I was on 14MHz transmitting
and the 7300 was listening on 28MHz receiving the overload being just too
much for this thing, but it was when I was on, say, 14MHz, and the 7300 was
on 21MHz

UGH
.None of my other radios have this problem.

 

There were other issues like the antenna tuner would only match SWR’s up to
3.0:1 and not even a smidge higher. (brick walled @ 3.0:1) (others lamented
the same) (you can do emergency mode with 50w out)

This was (normally) no problem for the core contesting bands, but it
precluded me from using the rig on any WARC bands where a bunch of my
antennas (ironically enough) had SWR’s just a wee bit above 3.0:1


.or if
it rained and my ZS6BKW\s SWR would rise ever so slightly on 14/28MHz,
making the rig’s tuner unable to match it, so I had to go into emergency
mode (50w).

 

There were times SSB output for no reason would be ¼ or ½ of the normal
output. (others have reported the same-apparently software related and you
had to do a full reset to fix (losing any/all settings you may have had)

 

Screen capture (on rig) did not work on my particular rig (a few others have
reported this – albeit not too many)

 

“Monitor” in the headphones on SSB sounded gnarly/nasty with my Heil headset
running through a laptop’s soundcard.  I never tried the hand mic (as I
would never be using it)

 

The “double touch the scope to QSY” thing was cutesy and clunky, not really
QSYing to the frequency close enough to hear the station in most cases,. You
still had to spin/tweak the VFO.  The concept was great but the way it
worked was far from perfected.

 

I sooooooo wanted to like the radio ( I saved my loonies for a year to buy
it) and I am not trashing Icom. I have a shack and closet full of Icoms, but
this radio is not without its teething problems.

 

All that being said, it’s probably a moderately good entry level radio for
most folks who do not contest, have only 1 radio, have all perfectly matched
antennas and don’t care about screen grabs (on rig).  Screen grabs onto the
SD card then looked at on-computer worked 100%).  It was definitely quieter
than my IC7410 or FT-450at.  All other filters and functions did seem to
work well.  For my eyes, some of the font on the display was hard to see.  I
normally need reading glasses if I am looking at very small font, but can
operate my IC-7410 and IC-746 w/o them. Maybe it was the white font on a
black background, or green traces of the scope.  Whatever it was, it was
hard for me to see the smaller details. (that’s more a problem with ME and
not the rig, but at ½ a century old, I probably represent a good chunk of
the aging ham demographic.

 

The scope worked well, for what it was, but would not display the weakest of
signals that I could clearly hear in my ½ century old ears, and even make a
QSO
.so I figure a brand new device should’ve been able to do that.

 

YMMV, 

 

Mike VE9AA

 

Mike, Coreen & Corey

Keswick Ridge, NB