ok so ive been going back and forth on this for like three weeks now and im just gonna ask. i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 120 feet across, and im trying to decide whether to put up a 40m dipole or just go with a vertical. currently running a 100w station, mostly interested in ragchewing and maybe some casual contesting down the road.

the thing is my yard isnt totally flat and there's a row of pine trees along the back fence which i was thinking i could use to support one end of a dipole. other end would be on a pushup mast maybe 30 feet up. center would be around 25-30 feet. i know thats not ideal height for 40 but its what i've got.

the vertical option is appealing because i could put it right in the middle of the yard away from the house and run some radials. but i've heard 40m verticals are pretty noisy on receive compared to a dipole especially in a suburban area. is that actually true or is it one of those things people just repeat without thinking about it

the noise thing is real but its not the whole story. a vertical is omnidirectional which means it hears everything equally, including all the local noise sources from every direction. a dipole has those nulls off the ends so depending on where your noise is coming from it can help a lot. in a suburban lot i'd lean dipole just for that reason alone.

that said 25-30 feet for 40m is not great, you're going to have a pretty high radiation angle which means less DX and more regional stuff. for ragchewing that might actually be fine depending on what distances you're working. if you're mostly talking to guys in your section or neighboring states a lower dipole does fine, it's basically a NVIS antenna at that height which honestly works great for that use case.

the inverted-v version might also be worth considering if your center support is the tallest point, drooping the ends down gets them out of the way and the pattern isn't terrible. i ran one at about 28 feet for two years before i got my tower sorted out and worked plenty of stations with it.

i went through this exact same thing last spring. ended up doing the vertical with 16 radials on the ground and honestly the noise floor is higher than my dipole yeah, but the low angle radiation makes up for it when conditions are good. worked japan on 40 which i never did with the dipole so thats something. but my dipole is also only like 35 feet up so take that with a grain of salt