so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here since i cant seem to find a straight answer anywhere. i have a 40m dipole up at about 35 feet, fed with coax, center at the peak of my garage roof. works okay but i feel like i'm missing a lot of local and regional contacts, like anything under maybe 300 miles just doesnt seem to come in that well compared to guys i talk to who are running verticals.

i know the dipole at that height is going to be kind of high-angle radiation which is better for DX and not great for the closer in stuff, and a vertical with a decent radial system should theoretically do better for that lower angle stuff but also the closer in ground wave type contacts. my problem is i dont really have space for a full radial field, maybe 8 or 10 radials is the most i could do realistically. is that even worth it or would i just be building something that performs worse than what i have now.

also someone mentioned a sloper might be a good middle ground but i honestly dont know enough about those to know if thats worth pursuing. anyone run both and have actual on-air comparisons?

the height thing is real, a dipole at 35 feet on 40m is only about 0.25 wavelengths up which actually isnt as bad as people think for mixed use — youre not going to be exclusively high angle at that height, theres still useful radiation at lower angles. but yeah compared to a vertical its going to favor the higher angles more.

8 to 10 radials on a vertical is definitely not ideal but its not useless either. i ran a vertical for a while with about 16 radials and it worked fine, not as good as a proper elevated radial setup but workable. the real killer with ground mounted verticals is the ground losses if you skimp on radials, so honestly if you can only do 8 i might try elevated radials instead — even 2 or 4 elevated radials at like 6-8 feet up can outperform 16 ground mounted ones depending on your soil.

slopers are interesting but they can be a bit finicky and the radiation pattern depends a lot on what the feedpoint is attached to. some guys love em, some hate em. id probably just try optimizing the dipole height first before adding a whole new antenna to the mix.

honestly in my experience the vertical won out for 40m regional work, i had almost the same setup as you a few years back and built a quarter wave vertical with about 20 radials and the difference on the closer in contacts was noticeable. not night and day but enough that i kept the vertical and only put the dipole back up when i want to work europe in the evenings.

that said 8 radials is where it starts getting marginal imo. i wouldnt bother going through all the construction hassle for 8 radials, either commit to doing it right or stick with the dipole and accept its what it is.