so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. currently running a 40m dipole up about 25 feet in an inverted-v config, fed with coax, and honestly it works fine but im starting to wonder if a vertical would do better especially for dx. the dipole has that figure-8 pattern which is great in two directions but theres some pretty big nulls off the ends and it happens that europe is almost exactly in one of those nulls from my QTH which is annoying.

a buddy told me a quarter wave vertical with a decent radial field would outperform my dipole for low angle radiation but i dont know if thats really true at 25 feet or if he's just been drinking the vertical kool-aid. i have space for either, backyard is maybe 80 by 60 feet so a proper radial field is doable. would probably do 16-24 radials on the ground, not buried, just laid out on the grass.

anyone actually compared these two setups side by side? not looking for theory, just what you actually observed on the air.

honest answer — at 25 feet your dipole is only about 0.19 wavelengths above ground on 40m which is pretty low, so the takeoff angle is going to be higher than ideal for dx anyway. a vertical with a decent radial system will generally beat a low dipole for dx because of that lower radiation angle, your friend isnt wrong about that part. 16 radials will help a lot, 32 is better but theres diminishing returns past that.

that said i ran a ground mounted quarter wave vertical on 40 for about two years and the noise floor was noticeably higher compared to my dipole. verticals are great transmitters but they pick up a ton of local noise. ended up going back to the dipole and just rotating it seasonally to favor europe in winter. not ideal but the signal to noise on receive made a real difference in actually pulling out weak stations.

if you can get the dipole higher, like 45 feet or more, that changes the math quite a bit. the low angle performance improves and you lose less to ground losses. worth considering before you rip everything out.

i put up a trap vertical last year thinking it would solve all my problems and yeah the dx got a bit better on 40 but the thing is a noise magnet like the previous guy said. my neighbor runs some kind of switching power supply or something and on the vertical it sounds like a bacon frying the whole band. on my dipole same time of day barely noticeable. just something to think about depending on your local noise situation.