I have been complaining that ICOM has not provided any software upgrade for the IC-7600 in the three years I have owned mine. In the past year, they offered upgrades for both of the “bigger” transceivers in the family, the IC-7700 and IC-7800. So I was hoping they would give us something for our 7600 rigs,. We talked about it on the IC-7600 reflector and some even said “no way, the CPU and memory are full and they can’t do any more.” I wasn’t buying that. Working in hardware and software development for many years, I knew this was unlikely.
At the Dayton Hamvention a couple weeks ago, it finally happened. ICOM has announced a major upgrade for the IC-7600 including numerous features and improvements. You can read about it in their press release. The most notable of the upgrades is a large waterfall display with mouse control to point to a station and retune to decode the signal.
So after three years of questioning the support by ICOM, I have to now become silent about it. They have shown that they do support their product line, even when the model has been selling for several years.
My guess is that this will be followed soon by announcements of a new model, or an upgraded model. I don’t plan to replace this rig any time soon, but you never know…
Kg3v Ham Radio Blog 
1 day after the v2 upgrade mine will no longer show the #2 clock. Shows on in the menu but no #2under#1. W6CAW
the second clock is shown depending on the way you display the waterfall.
Complaining about new f/w is, by the way, just nonsense. Look at the number of isuses solved with Kenwood and yaeu — you will see that one make does not do much and the other fixes the parts that should have bene fixed the first place. So, updates for the sake of having a TRX with bad performance… or a firmware that just works. I’d choose the latter.
I would like also ask KG3V to do a re-evaluation of the 7600 vs 3000. I only own Icom (7600/7000/202e) and kenwood trx (th f7e/tm255e/tm455e). I did use yaesu (FT1k, 2k, 857) for some time and traded in for an IC7000/7600.
No, your comment is nonsense. Transceivers are software-intensive today. No programmer gets all their design perfect and bug free the first time. That is just a fact. You would not accept any other software without some updates after the original release, so why is a Ham Transceiver different? As for the evaluation, I am doing it constantly. I will try to post some more results.