so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and i cant make up my mind. currently running a 40m half wave dipole up about 25 feet in an inverted V config, center fed with some old 450 ohm ladder line i had lying around going into a tuner. works ok but im wondering if a vertical would do better for DX since the takeoff angle would be lower. the thing is i dont have a great ground here, just a suburban lot, and everyone says you need a really solid radial field to get a vertical performing well.

had a buddy run an endfed vertical last summer and he said it was hit or miss, some days great some days terrible. not sure if that was the antenna or just conditions. anyway my dipole at 25 feet is probably radiating at like 45 degrees or something like that, which isnt ideal for working europe from the midwest but it does ok. thinking about maybe putting up a trap vertical or one of those fan verticals to compare but id have to build something since the commercial ones are kind of pricey right now.

anyone gone through this same decision and actually done a proper comparison? or am i overthinking it

honestly 25 feet for a 40m inverted V isnt too bad, you're probably getting more radiation than you think especially for NVIS stuff. the low angle thing with verticals is real but only if the ground system is decent, and a suburban lot with maybe 16 radials laid on the ground isnt going to compete with what the antenna modelers assume when they show you those pretty low angle patterns.

i ran a GAP Titan for a few years and yeah it worked but my dipole at 35 feet actually outperformed it on most paths unless conditions were really good and i was working long haul stuff. if you do go vertical, lay down as many radials as you can tolerate, like 32 minimum if you want it to actually behave. anything less and youre basically just heating up the ground. the fan vertical idea isnt bad though if you want multiband without a tuner, just takes some fiddling to get the resonant points right without them interacting too much.

same boat here a while back. ended up just building a 40m vertical out of some aluminum tubing i got from a hardware store, maybe 33 feet total with a loading coil to shorten it a bit cause i couldnt get full height. threw down about 20 radials and it was fine but not amazing. the dipole still beat it into europe most nights if im being honest. vertical did seem a bit better into asia and the pacific though so i guess it depends where youre trying to work. probably just keep both if you can.