I was stoked to receive an early Christmas present from my dad: The gift of a new Icom IC-7300 amateur radio HF transceiver. After all the positive comments about the radio that I’ve gotten from hams I follow on Mastodon, I was keenly interested in them to begin with, but in the few short days I’ve owned and use it, I can see why people love them.
But, let me start at the beginning. After getting back into ham radio this past summer (July 2024), my dad gave me his old IC-7000 transceiver, enabling me to get back on the HF bands. The 7000 was the one he used in his truck, and mentioned in some of the writing about mobile HF that he’s done over the years. It’s been great to be back on the HF bands, and the 7000 has served me well. About my only frustration with it is accessing settings, which Icom split into multiple menus that are, honestly, challenging to navigate. But with a compact transceiver designed predominantly for mobile use, space is at a premium, so there’s simply not room for dedicated controls for anything beyond the most-needed ones. Still, it did make the radio a bit tough to use sometimes.
Dad was joking from the very beginning about how “Christmas is coming,” so he seems to have hatched a plan from the start. Despite the hint-dropping and open references to an IC-7300, I was still pleasantly surprised when in mid-December, an envelope arrived in the mail from him. Inside, a check — and a note instructing me to head directly to the local Ham Radio Outlet store, and collect my new Icom. Not being one to argue, of course, I headed to HRO the next morning. 😉
A Slightly Bumpy Start
The IC-7300 arrived at a point where I was only about a week or so into a migration from using a MacBook (with macOS) for my ham radio digital work, to an old iMac — but one running Linux Mint. I mention this only because it complicated matters slightly when it came to getting the rig running with WSJT-X and FT8/FT4 modes. But when you add-in the learning curve of a radio that has a very wide range of options, and it was double trouble.
The first step was getting both CAT control of the rig and audio I/O working correctly. The former was fairly simple, as I’d previously decided to use wfview on the Linux machine, an open source CAT control application designed for certain Icom radios, including, notably, the IC-7300. I was using it with the IC-7000 for basic control, but the real reason I chose it was its combination of both UI that let’s me change radio settings from the computer, but also integrates emulation for Hamlib, a/k/a rigctld, which allows other software to use an API to control the radio as well. I merely switched the radio configuration in the software, and voila… I had a bandscope and waterfall live on the desktop, and the CAT control I needed.
What complicated the audio I/O is the combination of unfamiliarity with Linux Mint and how it handles audio, but also my own failure to attend to the obvious.
First, the audio system. I can’t say that I’m a particular fan of how audio works on Linux, and much of it has to do with how things end-up getting named. It also appears that there are multiple approaches to this, but in typical Linux style, the complexity is something to be embraced more than questioned (or fixed). With WSJT-X, this means that the audio input and output dropdowns are populated with confusing entries like these, associated with the IC-7300’s onboard USB port and integrated USB audio:
- alsa_input.usb-Burr-Brown_from_TI_USB_Audio_CODEC-00.analog-stereo
- alsa_output.usb-Burr-Brown_from_TI_USB_Audio_CODEC-00.analog-stereo
Super user-friendly, in other words. 🙄 I’m fairly technical, so I grasped which ones to use (the ones I just listed), but that still didn’t seem to work. The main issue is that no audio actually appeared to be getting to the Icom; there was no power output at all.
I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure it out. Complicating matters is that the device names kept changing, adding an ever-incrementing number to the end, like this:
- alsa_input.usb-Burr-Brown_from_TI_USB_Audio_CODEC-00.analog-stereo.1
- alsa_input.usb-Burr-Brown_from_TI_USB_Audio_CODEC-00.analog-stereo.2
- •••
- alsa_input.usb-Burr-Brown_from_TI_USB_Audio_CODEC-00.analog-stereo.23
…and so on. While I still don’t know the reason this occurred, in the end, I believe that four issues were happening in parallel, making it miserable to get it sorted-out:
- During troubleshooting, multiple times, I disconnected and reconnected the USB cable between the radio and the computer.
- RF was clearly getting into the USB cable initially.
- The IC-7300 setting DATA MOD (SET > Connectors) was at its default setting of ACC, which meant that it was ignoring the audio sent over the USB audio connection.
- I wasn’t paying attention to the transmit passband and where I’d set WSJT-X to transmit. (Oops.)
The primary issue was the last point: I had set the software outside of the SSB passband of the radio. While the IC-7300 has a slightly wider passband than the IC-7000, it appears, it’s only just. Where I got myself sidetracked was with a belief that it was considerably wider. I don’t know where I got that impression; I think I conflated some things with the QRP Labs QMX+ that I use for field work, which does indeed have a much wider passband — but it’s nothing to do with SSB, it’s the unique way that the QMX+ works with FT8: The incoming audio from WSJT-X is sampled, analyzed, and the radio generates a carrier and modules its frequency based on that sampling; it does not transmit the audio itself. Because of this, there is no SSB passband width concern. It’s a nice approach, but that’s not what the IC-7300 is doing, any more than the IC-7000 did. My bad.
In the end, once the radio was set to use the USB audio, and once I was transmitting within the passband, it worked. And once the computer was rebooted, all that confusing number incrementing business in the device names vanished, so I could re-select the devices in WSJT-X, and they stayed properly set.
A Beautiful Rig
The slightly head-banging experience of getting started aside, I can already say full-on that I love this radio. Comments from others I’ve seen in ham radio circles on Mastodon suggests that everyone who owns one of them loves them too, so I didn’t expect to have any different opinions myself.
If I have any criticisms so far at all, they are three-fold:
- The touchscreen isn’t quite as sensitive as I’d like it to be. I find myself having to touch things multiple times in some cases before it responds. But that’s as true of my Apple Watch or iPhone as it is with this. (I like the concept of touchscreens; I don’t care much for them in practice.)
- The onboard antenna tuner is designed more for optimizing an already fairly well-matched antenna, and can’t tune my off-center-fed dipole on all the bands I want to operate on, necessitating my continuing to use the LDG tuner I was using with the IC-7000.
- The radio has an overwhelming array of capabilities and options, and as is typical, they’re often not particularly logical, nor particularly well documented.
In truth, that last point is a bit subjective, and additionally, any new toy with any complexity is going to take some time to learn. As for the antenna tuner, I might be slightly disappointed, but not particular surprised.
On a more positive note, in the few days I’ve owned and used my IC-7300, here are some of the highlights in my mind:
- It’s easy to access functionality. Learning where things are has a learning curve as I already implied, but nevertheless, Icom have made the most out of the touchscreen interface. Between the physical Menu and Function buttons just under the touchscreen to call-up options on the touchscreen itself, to the Multi knob/button and its functionality, it’s easy and quick enough to get to the things you want to change. From a usability perspective, it’s a major improvement from the IC-7000 I’m accustomed to using every day.
- It runs cool. One concerning thing about the IC-7000 was that mine ran very, very hot. By contrast, it would seem that the IC-7300 was designed with digital modes and duty cycles in-mind. Even extended FT8 or FT4 sessions at perhaps unnecessarily high power have barely nudged the temperature gauge (I keep the Meter option enabled for SWR monitoring, so the temperature is visible as well).
- So many little nice-to-haves. This is a long and growing list all by itself, but I love having a monitor function. The screen is large enough and high enough resolution to be useful. It’s nice to have the “D” (digital) settings with the SSB modes to ensure receive filters are set properly for digital operations without messing about. It works perfectly with my LDG Z-11Pro II antenna tuner (automatically disengaging the internal tuner). The bandscope and waterfall displays are both useful and aesthetically fun to have. The Meter display option packs a ton of useful information onto the screen all at once in a way that’s actually useful (and usable).
- Aesthetically, it’s beautiful. I know this is subjective stuff, but I find the industrial design to be quite appealing.
I’ve not yet operated it in any mode other than FT8, but even just for that, it feels like a major upgrade to me. And once I finally have the courage to operate more CW, I’m quite confident that it’ll be a great platform for that. As for phone, well, I don’t operate voice all that much, but I’ll nevertheless get the ALC and compression set-up for my speaking voice, and be ready for that as well.
The bottom line for me? As I said at the outset, I love the radio, and I love using it. So, thanks, Dad. You made my day — and made many more days to come.