so ive been doing a lot of hilltop portable ops lately mostly on 2m and 70cm, usually trying to hit repeaters 60-80 miles out or just work simplex with buddies across the valley. right now im lugging a 5/8 wave mag mount on a small ground plane i cobbled together but honestly the results have been kind of inconsistent and i cant tell if its my radio, the feedline, or just the antenna being the weak link.

been looking at either building a 5 element yagi for 2m or just buying one of those diamond or comet dual band collinears that are like 4-5 feet long. the yagi obviously wins on gain in one direction but then i have to point the thing and it gets annoying when people are calling from different directions. the collinear seems more practical for a portable setup but im wondering how much gain im actually giving up in a real world situation not just on paper.

anyone done back to back comparisons on a hilltop? and yeah i know the answer is probably 'just build both and try' but curious what others have found before i start cutting elements

yeah this is a pretty classic tradeoff and honestly it depends what youre doing. if youre working repeaters spread around 360 degrees then a collinear makes way more sense, you dont want to be rotating a yagi every 5 minutes. but if youre trying to make a specific path work or do any kind of weak signal ssb then a yagi will eat the collinear alive, no contest.

i built a 6 element 2m yagi from one of the VK2ZOI designs a couple years back, light enough to carry up a hill no problem and the difference compared to my j-pole was honestly shocking. got into a repeater i had never hit before on low power just from antenna gain alone. but i only point it one direction when im up there so it suits me. if your use case is more social and you want to rag chew with whoever is on, get the collinear and dont overthink it. the diamond x50 or whatever its called is solid, lots of people run them portable with decent results.

feedline is probably killing you more than the antenna choice tbh. whats the run length and what coax are you using up there? i spent months thinking my portable antenna sucked and it was just that i had like 15 feet of rg58 with a couple connectors that hadnt been sealed properly. swapped to a short run of lmr240 and suddenly things made a lot more sense.