so ive been doing a fair bit of portable VHF operation lately, mostly 2m with some 70cm thrown in when i can get someone on the other end, and im starting to wonder if lugging a yagi up a hill is actually worth it compared to just using a decent collinear on a mast. right now i have a Diamond X50 which is fine for the local repeaters and general ragchewing but when i try to work some of the weaker stations in the next valley over it just doesnt cut it.

ive been looking at a 5 element yagi for 2m, nothing crazy, just something that gives me a decent amount of gain without being a pain to carry and set up. the thing is i do a lot of solo hiking so i need something that breaks down reasonably small and doesnt take forever to assemble when im already cold and tired at the summit. my mate uses a homebrew tape measure yagi for foxhunting and swears by it but im not sure thats really what i want for general comms work.

has anyone run both setups back to back and actually compared them? like real world not just spec sheet numbers. the X50 is rated for something like 6dBi and even a modest 5el yagi would beat that by a fair margin but obviously you lose the omnidirectional coverage which matters if you dont know exactly where the other station is. just wondering if anyone has opinions on this

yeah the yagi wins every time for point to point work but youre right that it comes with tradeoffs. i ran a 6 element on 2m for a while doing portable and honestly the gain difference is noticeable even over relatively short paths, especially when you hit an obstacle or the other station is running low power. the issue is exactly what you said — you need to know roughly where to point it and if youre just calling CQ or trying to work a net with stations spread all around you then a collinear makes way more sense operationally.

what i ended up doing for a while was running both — collinear on a lightweight fibreglass mast for general use, and the yagi on a separate small tripod for when i specifically knew i had a DX target or a weak station i wanted to nail down. pain in the neck to carry but it worked well. these days i mostly just use a 4 element tape measure yagi for 2m, its light enough that the tradeoff is worth it, takes about 3 minutes to put together. not as good as a proper aluminum element yagi but close enough for portable work and my back thanks me for it.

the tape measure yagi is actually pretty decent for what it is, i built one last winter from one of the ARRL designs and was surprised how well it held up. for pure summit to summit contacts where you roughly know the bearing its hard to beat for weight vs performance. that said if your doing nets or just generally operating from a hilltop without a specific target the omni is just more practical, less thinking involved too when you're already dealing with wind and cold and trying to log contacts.