so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. currently running an inverted-V dipole for 40m, center at about 35 feet with the ends drooping down to maybe 8 feet off the ground. works okay but i feel like im missing stuff, especially to the east and west since the pattern obviously favors north/south broadside.

a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just put up a vertical with a decent radial field and call it a day. says his 40m vertical with like 16 radials walks all over his old dipole for DX. but i dont know, ive read a lot of conflicting stuff about ground losses eating up vertical efficiency unless you really go nuts with the radials, like 60+ to get it close to ideal.

my yard situation is not great — suburban lot, maybe 60x100 feet, so a full size 40m vertical would need the radials crammed in pretty tight. wondering if anyone has actually done a real comparison on the same band with similar conditions, not just theoretical stuff from the antenna handbook

honestly the inverted-V with ends that low is probably hurting you more than you think. the low end wires are basically coupling into the ground and you're losing a lot of the pattern advantage. if you can get the center up higher, even to 45 or 50 feet, you'd notice a real difference before you go tearing everything down for a vertical.

that said your buddy isnt wrong either. a vertical with a halfway decent radial system — doesnt need to be 120 radials, somewhere around 30-40 decent length ones gets you most of the benefit — will give you low angle radiation that an inverted-V at 35 feet just cant match. for DX on 40 you really want that low angle stuff. the dipole/inverted-V tends to favor shorter skip and near-vertical incidence which is great for regional contacts but if youre trying to work europe from the midwest the vertical has a real edge there.

my suggestion, run both if you can. even a simple vertical temporary install with some random radials thrown on the ground would let you do a proper A/B comparison on a real pileup and you'd have your answer in like one evening of operating

60x100 lot is actually not terrible for radials, I run a 43ft vertical on a similar sized lot with about 24 radials and they're just kind of scattered wherever they fit under the grass. not textbook but SWR is solid and the antenna works fine. the ones near the base matter more than the long ones anyway from what i've read.

one thing nobody mentions enough is the noise difference. my vertical picks up way more local QRM than my dipole does. if youre in a noisy suburb that might matter depending on what you're trying to do