so ive been running a diamond x50 on a mast at my hilltop QTH for a couple years now and its been fine for local repeater stuff but im starting to get into weak signal work on 2m and 70cm and i'm wondering if its worth swapping over to a yagi setup or maybe a stacked pair of collinears

the site is pretty exposed, around 1200ft asl and i can already hit a bunch of repeaters 80-100 miles out without much trouble which tells me the location is doing most of the heavy lifting. but when i try working SSB simplex on 144.200 its kinda hit or miss and i'm pretty sure its my antenna holding me back more than the radio (ft-817 running about 4w)

i've been looking at the innovantennas ltb series and also an old cushcraft 13b2 that someone local has for sale. the cushcraft is long like almost 12ft i think and i dont really have a way to rotate it right now so that's a complication. honestly not sure if a fixed yagi pointing northeast would even make sense given where most of the activity seems to be, at least on the days i've been monitoring

anyone running yagis fixed at a hilltop site or does it basically require an azimuth rotator to be useful

the 817 at 4 watts into a decent yagi will surprise you, honestly the gain difference between a collinear and a 13 element yagi is night and day on weak signal ssb. the x50 is maybe 6dbi on 2m, a 13b2 is going to be somewhere around 12-13dbd depending on who you believe, so you're talking about a significant chunk of db you're leaving on the table right now

fixed yagi can work but you really need to think hard about where you want it pointing. if there's a clear population center or known active grid square in one direction it can make sense, some guys run two yagis fixed at 90 degrees to each other and just switch between them, cheap and effective. but a rotator really is the right answer for serious weak signal work, even a cheap TV rotator will do fine if youre not in a wind prone area... oh wait you said 1200ft exposed hilltop, yeah get a proper one, tv rotators dont last long up there

had a cushcraft 13b2 for years, great antenna but the matching network on those older ones can get flaky if its been outside a while, worth checking the gamma match before you commit to buying it. if the swr looks weird on 2m it's usually that

for what it's worth i ran mine fixed for about a year pointing roughly toward the city and it was fine for what i was doing but i missed a lot of sporadic e openings that went a different direction so eventually i caved and got a rotator. the innovantennas stuff looks nice but ive never used one personally