so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and im just gonna ask. i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 80 feet wide, and im trying to decide whether to put up a proper 40m dipole or just go with a vertical. my neighbor already has complaints about the fence so a big horizontal antenna is gonna be a conversation i dont want to have.

the thing is ive read so many contradictory things. one guy says verticals are great for DX because of the low angle radiation, another guy says theyre noise magnets and his dipole at 25 feet blows away his vertical. i get that ground radials matter a lot for verticals but i dont have a way to bury a ton of them, maybe i could lay them on the ground under the grass. would a vertical with like 16 surface radials actually be competitive or am i just gonna be disappointed

mainly working 40 and maybe some 20m, not trying to win contests just ragchew and occasional DX when the band opens up. running about 100w from an IC-7300.

honestly 16 radials on the ground is going to work, its not ideal but its not terrible either. i ran a 40m vertical with about 20 radials just laid on the surface for two years before i moved and it did fine for DX. the key thing people dont say enough is that a dipole at only 25 feet on 40m isnt actually low angle anyway, youre basically doing nvis at that height which is great for regional contacts but not for chasing europe or japan. so the vertical with mediocre radials might actually beat a low dipole for real DX even with the noise disadvantage.

the noise thing is real though. if youre in a suburban area the vertical is going to pick up all kinds of garbage. whether thats a dealbreaker depends on your local noise floor. whats your S-meter showing on a quiet band with nothing transmitting

i had almost the exact same situation and went with an end-fed halfwave instead, runs along the fence line so its pretty stealthy and the neighbors havent said anything. just a thought if the dipole footprint is really the issue. the 9:1 unun and a short counterpoise and youre on most bands. not trying to derail your vertical vs dipole thing but sometimes there's a third option that solves the actual problem which is the neighbor not the antenna type