so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask here because im going in circles reading reviews. i mostly do local 2m work, some APRS, the occasional linked repeater stuff when im bored on weekends. right now i have a mag mount on the truck and a cheap j-pole in the attic which honestly barely works through the roof of my house.

the question is whether to go with a decent collinear up on the chimney bracket or just bite the bullet and put up a yagi pointed at the main repeater about 35 miles out. the repeater direction is pretty fixed for me, like 99% of what i care about is roughly NNW from here. but i also dont want to completely kill my omnidirectional capability in case someone is calling from a weird direction or i want to hit the APRS digipeater which is sort of southeast.

height isnt really the issue, i can get to about 30 feet on the chimney bracket or maybe 40 if i do a push-up mast in the backyard. feedline run would be maybe 60 feet either way so coax loss isnt dramatically different. im just not sure the gain from a yagi is worth giving up the omni pattern, especially since i dont have a rotor and wasnt really planning on getting one.

honestly for what youre describing id probably just go with a decent collinear. something like a Diamond X200A or X300A at 35-40 feet is going to outperform that j-pole by a country mile and youll still be able to hit everything in range without thinking about which way the antenna is pointing. yagis are great but without a rotor they kind of become a fixed-shot deal and you already said you dont want that.

the other thing people dont talk about enough is that a lot of those 35 mile repeater links are way more forgiving than you think once you get the antenna off the house and clear of the roof. ive seen guys go from barely making a repeater to full quieting just by moving a vertical from an attic to a 25 foot mast outside. the building loss on VHF is pretty nasty. get it outside first and see what you actually have, then decide if you need directional gain.

yeah i had the same dilemma last year and went collinear, no regrets. ended up with an X50 on a push-up mast around 35 feet and the difference from my old attic antenna was kind of embarassing honestly. that said if the linked repeater is really the main thing you care about a 5 or 6 element yagi even just ziptied to a fixed pipe in that direction would probably knock your socks off. you could always do both if you have a second coax run and a cheap coax switch, keep the collinear as your everyday antenna and switch to the yagi when you want to ragchew on that linked system. thats kind of what i ended up doing eventually anyway.