so ive been running a pretty standard 40m dipole at about 25 feet for the past two years, fed with coax, nothing fancy. works okay for regional stuff but DX has always been kind of hit or miss. a buddy of mine keeps telling me i should put up a vertical instead and says the low angle radiation will make a big difference for working anything more than a few hundred miles out.

thing is i dont really have a great spot for a vertical unless i put it near the fence which is probably not ideal and i'd have to lay a bunch of radials under there. not sure if a 4:1 unun and some random length wire would be just as good or if thats a completely different animal. anyone actually done a side by side comparison or switched from one to the other and noticed a real difference on 40? wondering if its worth the hassle of redoing everything.

honestly this depends so much on your ground and how high that dipole actually is. 25 feet on 40m is pretty low, which means you're getting kind of a compromise — not super low angle, not super high angle, kinda middle of the road. a vertical with a decent radial field, like 16-32 radials minimum, will almost certainly outperform it for DX just because of the radiation angle. but and this is a big but, verticals hear all the noise too. your dipole might actually have a better signal to noise ratio depending on your local rf environment.

i switched from a dipole to a homebrew quarter wave vertical with 32 radials a few years back and dx improved noticeably but so did the noise. ended up adding a receive loop for listening which kind of defeats the simplicity of the whole thing. if you do go vertical dont skimp on radials, thats where most people mess up and then wonder why it doesnt work.

near the fence might actually be fine depending on what the fence is made of, chain link is obviously going to cause issues but wood or vinyl should be okay. i ran my vertical about 8 feet from a wooden fence for a year with no real problems.

the radial thing is the real pain though yeah. i did like 20 radials cut to about 33 feet each and just laid them on the ground, stapled down eventually got buried by the grass. took an afternoon but it wasnt that bad. made a real difference compared to when i only had like 6 radials in there. 40m DX definitely opened up for me after that. worked JA regularly which i almost never did with the dipole.