Birthday present !

Today marks my 51 year birthday. And last week I already bought myself a birthday present. I've been saving money for it for almost 2 years. Now I finally sold some of my equipment and was able to buy it in the end. Actually it would have been a good present last year for my 50th birthday but other costs didn't allow me to buy the radio.  I have to say, the radio was not in stock last week, but just in time Marcus PA2DB from Hamshop.nl did e-mail me the radio was in stock again and offered me the IC-7300 for a better price without even knowing it is a birthday present ;-).

Of course setting it up was piece of "birthday" cake since I still have my SD card programmed with the settings from PC7B's IC-7300 I had here in the shack lately. The only thing that was different was the assignment of a different COM port. Of course that problem was solved quickly. First QSO I made a few days ago was with 5T5PA Johannes from Mauretania on 10m FT8. So far I only used and tried the radio on digimodes, I haven't even tried SSB yet.

Wow, I can't believe I finally have the radio that I wanted so badly. Not that it will give me more DX (or may be it will?). But it certainly has a lot more features and possebilities compared to my 21 year old IC-706MK2G. I already know a few, but there is a lot more to find out. I didn't want to try things on PC7B's IC-7300 but with my own now I'm free to experiment. I'm shure I'll write about the experiences here on my weblog.