so ive been going back and forth on this for about a month now and i cant make up my mind. i have maybe 60 feet of usable space in my backyard, not a lot but enough to put up something. currently running an old MFJ vertical that i borrowed from a buddy but i keep hearing that a dipole even an inverted V would outperform it especially for stateside contacts on 40. the vertical does okay i guess but the noise floor on receive is pretty rough, like S5-S6 even when the bands quiet.

my thinking was an inverted V with the apex at around 30 feet using my push-up mast, fed with coax through a 1:1 balun. should work right? i built one years ago on a camping trip but never did any real comparison testing. anyone actually put both up and measured the difference or is it just one of those things where you go with what fits your situation

the noise floor thing is almost certainly the vertical being unbalanced and picking up all the local junk — rf from switching power supplies, led drivers, all that garbage. a dipole especially an inverted V fed with a decent balun will usually be noticeably quieter on receive, at least in a typical suburban setup. doesnt mean it transmits better necessarily but if you cant hear through the noise it doesnt matter how good your signal is on the other end.

30 feet apex is fine for 40m, not ideal but workable. just make sure your feedpoint impedance isnt completely off — at that height and angle the impedance can shift quite a bit from the textbook 73 ohms so the balun helps but you might still want to run it through a tuner. i ran an inverted V for years at about 25 feet apex and worked plenty of dx on 40, nothing exotic but it got the job done.

honestly depends a lot on what youre trying to do. if you want low angle radiation for dx the vertical wins on paper but only if the ground radial system is actually decent. most people underestimate how many radials you need to make a vertical actually perform — like 16 minimum buried radials to get close to what the models promise, and even then. if the borrowed vertical has maybe 2-3 radials on the ground thats probably more your problem than the antenna type itself.

that said i switched to an inverted V a couple years ago and havent looked back, just way easier to deal with and quieter like the other guy said. 60 feet of space is plenty, you could even run it as a flattop if the height is an issue.