so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i just want to hear from people who have actually tried both. my situation is a small suburban lot, maybe 60ft of usable run in the backyard if i go diagonal, and my neighbor on the east side has this massive oak that id have to work around. i can get a dipole up maybe 25 feet at the center which i know isnt ideal but its what i got.

the other option ive been thinking about is a vertical — was looking at the Hustler 6BTV or maybe just building a simple quarter wave with a decent radial field. my concern with the vertical is the noise floor on 40, it seems like every time im listening on that band theres just garbage coming from every direction and i feel like a low dipole might at least reject some of that by being more directional. but then again low dipoles on 40 are pretty much nvis and id just be talking to people in a 300 mile radius.

my main interest is working some DX, not contesting seriously, just want to make contacts outside north america semi regularly. what would you guys actually do in this situation

honestly at 25ft on 40m your dipole is going to be what, roughly 0.2 wavelengths up? you're right that it's going to be mostly nvis, good for regional stuff but the takeoff angle is going to be too high for consistent DX. you'll still get DX, just not reliably and you'll be missing a lot of the low angle stuff that's actually making it through.

the vertical is probably the better call for what you want to do, but and this is a big but — the radial system matters way more than people admit. ive seen guys throw up a 6BTV with like 8 radials and then complain it doesnt work and yeah of course it doesnt. if you can get 16-20 radials down, even short ones, it starts to actually perform. the 6BTV is a decent antenna for the money but its not magic. if noise is your concern you might look at a receive only antenna for listening and use the vertical just for TX, some guys do that with a small loop or a beverage if you have the space, but thats probably more complexity than you want right now.

short answer: vertical with a real radial field for DX, accept the noise, use good filtering and a decent receiver.

i had almost this exact same debate last year and ended up going with a trapped vertical. do i love it? not really. does it work? yeah well enough. the noise thing is real, 40m vertical picks up everything. my neighbor has some kind of switching power supply or something and it just wipes out half the band some evenings. but when the band is clean i've worked europe and japan from the midwest so it does what it needs to do.

one thing i'll say — if you go the dipole route dont write it off completely just because its low. i had a dipole at about 20ft before and i still worked some DX with it, not a ton but it happened. low dipoles are weird, sometimes they just get out better than they should on certain paths. might be worth putting up the dipole first since its cheaper and see how you like it before committing to a vertical and digging up your whole yard for radials