You're right about not keying too much into it and stock radios dead key 3 or 4. I bought 2 kl 60s and I think it's a good choice for those who dont want someone hacking up their radio peaking and tuning it or maybe they don't know anyone in their area that will. The issue is with cbs at least many dont come with a variable to turn down the dead key. I bought the president walker 2, a great radio with adjustable power and the midland 75-822 handheld with car adapter on low. It seems to work quite well, the instructions mentioned using a low pass filter which at first I ignored. After much testing and later buying a low pass filter, I found depending on antenna you may see a much higher swr using it without the filter. With the filter it removes the harmonics from the equation and thus swr value is back to normal. Whether the harmonics can ultimately damage the amp I dont know I'm not a radio technician but I do think its a good addition. Back to the stock radio suggestion, since there are limited options for radios with a variable, yall might call me stupid but in my experiments I think I may have a solution. Instead of having crazy Joe tinkering with your radio internals, simply buy a coax antenna t splitter and run one side to the amp and antenna. Then run the other side of the t to a small dummy load, this will split your power in half going to the amp. Doing it at the stock radio antenna jack, if the radio does 3 dead key the dummy will get 1.5 and the amp 1.5. If it does 4 the dummy gets 2 and amp gets 2, it surprisingly seems to work this way.