so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and cant really decide. i have a pretty decent 40m dipole up at about 30 feet, fed with 450 ohm ladder line into a tuner, works ok but the pattern is obviously all over the place depending on how i had to bend it to fit the yard. been thinking about putting up a trapped vertical for 40/20/15 since i could get it more in the clear, probably 10-15 feet from the fence but thats about as good as it gets here.

my concern is the traps. every time i read about these things someone is saying the traps are lossy or they had one fail on them or whatever. but then i also see guys running them with decent results on 20 and 15. i dunno, maybe im overthinking it. has anyone actually done a side by side kind of comparison or switched from one to the other and noticed a real difference? the dipole is definitely better on 40 i think just from listening but hard to say for sure without some controlled test which obviously im not doing in my backyard

traps arent magic but they arent the disaster some people make them out to be either. the efficiency hit is real but its not like youre losing 3 S-units or anything dramatic. i ran a hustler 4BTV for years and it did fine on 20 and 15, 40 was always a little underwhelming but that has more to do with the physics of a short vertical on 40 than the traps themselves. ground radials matter way more than people realize — i had like 8 radials under mine when i first put it up and the noise floor was noticeably higher than after i got to 32. if your dipole is at 30 feet thats not amazing height for 40 either so its probably closer than you think.

honestly if fitting both bands without retuning is the goal, the vertical isnt a bad choice. just lay as many radials as you can stand to put down.

i switched from a fan dipole to a vertical a couple years ago mostly because the neighbors complained about the wire running across the yard lol. the vertical is definitely quieter receive wise which some people hate and some people like, depends on your noise floor situation. on transmit i honestly cant tell that much difference on 20m, maybe a tiny bit weaker reports on the vertical but nothing consistent. 40 the dipole was better for sure, especially for regional stuff. if youre doing mostly DX on 20/15 the vertical low angle radiation might actually help you more than that dipole at 30 feet depending on the path.