so ive been running a end-fed halfwave on 40 for about a year now and its fine i guess but i keep reading that a proper dipole is supposed to be noticeably better and i cant tell if thats actually true or if its just the usual antenna religion stuff you see online. my situation is i have a pretty small suburban lot, maybe 60 feet of usable horizontal space if i angle it a bit so a full size 40m dipole would need to be bent into an inverted-v or something which i've done before on other bands but never 40.

the alternative i've been kicking around is a vertical with some radials, i've got room to put one in the back corner of the yard and lay out maybe 8-10 radials without my wife noticing too much. i know verticals have a lower angle of radiation which is supposed to be good for dx but i'm mainly working stateside so i'm not sure that even matters for my use case.

anybody run both and actually compared them? not looking for theoretical stuff just real world impressions. does the vertical on 40 actually sound as noisy as people say or is that overblown

ran a trapped vertical for years on 40 and 80 before i finally put up a proper inverted-v and the difference on receive was immediately obvious. not a little bit — a lot. verticals absolutely do pick up more noise in a suburban environment, the low angle stuff helps on dx paths but when you're working stateside you really want that higher angle radiation anyway and the dipole just delivers that naturally.

the 60 foot lot thing isn't a dealbreaker for an inverted-v, mine has the apex at about 35 feet and the legs come down at around 45 degrees and it works great. you lose a tiny bit compared to a flat top but honestly in the real world i'd take a slightly compromised dipole over a vertical in a neighborhood any day. the noise floor difference alone is worth the install hassle.

i went vertical on 40 specifically because i had the same space problem and yeah it works but the noise is real. my s-meter sits about 2 s-units higher on the vertical vs my 80m dipole on a shared part of the band where i can compare them. for dx late at night when things quiet down it's fine but during the day forget it half the time.

one thing nobody mentioned to me when i built mine — the radial count matters way more than length up to a point, i went from 4 radials to 16 and noticed an improvement, more than going from 16 to 32 later. if you do go vertical dont cheap out on the ground system