Late, but...

I have an ARR (Advanced Receiver Research) 432 RF-switched pre-amp hanging from the UHF side of my Arrow with its own 12V NiMH pack.

I went "switched" in case I do something stupid.

I wear a mic-headset (YH2) and run the FT-530 in my right hand, and hold the Arrow in my left. I've rigged up patch cables that run HT audio (thru a 60db pad) into one side of my stereo digital recorder, and ambient audio (from a mic) into the other so I can isolate what I said and what I heard. Some of my log recordings are a great argument for full-duplex; e.g. I can hear clearly and immediately if a letter got lost and I need to repeat my grid a second time --- especially running 5W. The FT530 does not de-sense and I can clearly hear my own downlink in the headset.

With the pre-amp, clean sky and polarization match, SO-50 is full scale into the FT-530 RX. Where it helps is when I have trees and a less than optimal horizon (pretty common in New England).

I ran the same on AO-51 and AO-27 and could copy right down to the horizon, easily working into Europe.

Bill W1PA