Is it worth upgrading my radio?

I recently upgraded to General, just a week or so ago. I’ve had an HF+6M rig for awhile now for use on 10M and 6M.

The radio is an Alinco DX-70. It’s 100 watts on the HF bands and 10 watts on 6M.

I typically work portable from a battery and tote everything around in backpack, so having relatively small rig is important to me. I’m only using single sideband at the moment. I’m content with that for the time being, so I don’t need extra capability for digital modes or better CW filtering or anything like that.

I often use a fiberglass mast with an end fed dipole. I also use a Super Antenna, and a few other setups.

I like the Alinco, and it’s not much bigger than a Yaesu 857, but quite a bit heavier.

I get decent signal reports, but I often operate in urban parks. I’m guessing my noise floor is pretty high (though I don’t have anything to compare it to).

I’m wondering if a more modern transceiver with DSP and other adaptive filtering tech would make it worth upgrading. I feel like I can often hear contacts, but can’t really pull anything intelligible out of the noise.

The Alinco has positive and negative attenuation in four steps (-20, -10, 0 and +10), which really doesn’t seem to do much other than raise and lower the level of everything I’m hearing including the noise. It has a “normal” and “narrow” filter. This does help a bit on SSB, but I think it’s designed to set to narrow for CW work. There is no RF gain adjustment.

I love the Alinco. It let me try HF as a tech for less than the price of some HTs. I bascially stole it for $325 shipped, but I don’t get a lot of time to spend on the air, and if the difference between the Alinco and a modern rig (but portable) rig is night and day, I’ll start saving my pennies.

So would it be worth upgrading? If so, which models? The 857 seems to have the right form factor to me, but I’ve heard it’s RX is not so great (is it still way better than the Alinco?). Frankly, most Icom and Kenwood rigs way too big to me, but I’ve really only seen photos.

Anyway, thank in advance for the advice.

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