so ive been going back and forth on this for a couple weeks now and cant really make up my mind. basically my lot is about 80 feet wide and maybe 120 deep, suburban neighborhood, HOA isnt terrible but i still need to keep things semi-stealthy. currently running a little IC-7300 into a G5RV that i have up about 25 feet in kind of an inverted-V configuration and honestly its been ok but 40m performance has been disappointing, especially on anything past about 1500 miles or so.

ive been reading about putting up a resonant 40m dipole fed with ladder line through a tuner but the space is a bit tight to get a full half wave horizontal without some serious bending at the ends. the other option i keep coming back to is a vertical — something like a trap vertical or even just a quarter wave with a decent radial field. i know verticals have a reputation for picking up more noise but the low angle radiation is supposed to be better for dx right? at least thats what ive been reading.

anyone been down this road and have actual on-air experience comparing the two for 40m specifically? im not super worried about being the loudest guy on the band, i just want to actually make contacts past the US borders without it being a total fight every time.

ran both at my old QTH for a few years so i can actually give you a real comparison here. the vertical wins on low angle, no question, but — and this is a big but — that radial system really matters more than most people want to admit. i had a quarter wave vertical with like 8 radials and it was honestly worse than my droopy dipole until i got the radial count up past 30 or so. once i did that the dx paths opened up noticeably, particularly to europe and south america in the evenings.

that said if your space is tight and you cant lay down a decent radial field then a dipole even with some end bending is probably going to perform better in practice. a bent dipole loses some efficiency but not as much as people think if the bends arent too severe. i had mine with the last 10 feet or so angled down at about 45 degrees on each side and it worked fine. noise floor was also way lower on the dipole which made weak signal work a lot easier even if the signal itself was a touch stronger on the vertical.

honestly for your situation id try the resonant dipole first since you already have the infrastructure mostly there — just pull the G5RV down and put up a proper cut dipole and see where you're at before spending money on a vertical and all the radial wire you'd need.

the noise thing with verticals is real, especially in a suburban neighborhood. i put up a hustler 5-btv a couple years ago thinking id get all this great dx and yeah the dx was there but so was every switching power supply and LED driver within 300 feet of my house lol. ended up going back to a dipole just because i could actually hear the weak ones without the noise floor being a complete mess.

if you do go vertical look into the elevated radial designs, some guys swear by just 4 elevated radials at like 6-8 feet off the ground vs a huge buried field and the numbers are apparently pretty close. might be easier to deal with in a smaller yard too.