so ive been running a center fed dipole for 40m for about two years now, got it up about 35 feet in an inverted V configuration and honestly its been fine for domestic stuff but i keep reading that verticals with a good radial field will beat a low dipole for dx every time because of the lower takeoff angle. my property isnt huge so getting it much higher isnt really an option unless i put up a tall mast which is a whole other project i dont want to start right now.

been thinking about pulling down the dipole and throwing up a vertical instead, probably one of those trap verticals or maybe just a quarter wave with a bunch of radials on the ground. question is whether thats actually going to make a noticeable difference on 40 for working europe and japan from the midwest, or if im just going to end up with a noisier antenna that picks up every power line in the neighborhood and still doesnt do what i want. anyone actually done this comparison with real results, not just theory

yeah this is one of those questions that never really has a clean answer because it depends so much on your specific ground conductivity and how many radials you can actually lay down. i went through basically the same thing a few years back. had a dipole at 30 feet and put up a vertical with 32 radials and on 40m the vertical was noticeably better for the long path stuff, like JA and VK, but the dipole actually held its own for europe, probably because the takeoff angle difference wasnt as dramatic at that distance from here.

the noise thing is real though. my vertical picks up a lot more local garbage than the dipole did. if youre in a suburban area with switching power supplies and LED dimmers everywhere you might find the SNR actually gets worse even if the signal is theoretically stronger. more radials help, 60+ is where it starts to really flatten out the ground losses. if you cant do that many dont bother pulling down the dipole is my honest take

i did this exact swap last spring. went from an inverted V at about 40 feet to a hamstick-style vertical with like 16 radials and honestly i regret it a little. worked a few new ones on 40 but the noise floor went up noticeably and im in a pretty quiet rural area so i cant imagine what it'd be like in a subdivision. the trap vertical i had before that was even worse, felt like i was running barefoot half the time even at 100w.

if i were doing it over id probably just try to get the dipole higher before scrapping it entirely. even getting from 35 to 50 feet makes a real difference in the pattern