so ive been running a Diamond X50 for a couple years now on 2m/70cm and honestly its been fine for hitting the local repeaters, no real complaints. but theres a repeater about 55 miles out that i can just barely scratch into on my FT-7900 and its annoying because theyre running a good linked system and id love to get into it reliably.

started thinking about whether a yagi would actually be worth putting up just for that one repeater, but then id lose the omnidirectional coverage i have now. someone at the club mentioned stacking a second X50 but honestly i dont know enough about that to know if its even practical for a fixed home install. the repeater is roughly to my northeast so a yagi pointed that way would work great but then im giving up everything else.

is there some middle ground here or am i just going to have to pick one or the other. thinking maybe a small 5 or 6 el yagi on a separate feedline and just switch between them when i want to hit that far repeater. anybody done something like this

yeah the switch between two antennas thing is totally doable and a lot of guys do exactly that. coax switch is like $30-40 and you just run two feedlines. i ran an M2 2M5WL alongside my vertical for a while and the difference for that one repeater i was chasing was night and day, like went from occasional scratchy hits to full quieting. the yagi is just a completely different tool for a specific job.

stacking verticals is a real thing and does give you gain but it gets complicated fast, you need a phasing harness thats cut right and the spacing matters a lot, and honestly for 3-4 dB gain its probably more trouble than just throwing up a small yagi on a separate mount. if you know the direction of the repeater the yagi wins every time for that use case. i wouldnt overthink it, a 6 element on 2m is a pretty small antenna physically and easy enough to put on a chimney mount or a push up pole

i did almost this exact thing last summer, had a vertical on the roof and put up a cheap 7el yagi i built from a design off the ARRL site just for one hilltop repeater. ran both into an A/B coax switch i mounted in the shack. works great, only thing i will say is make sure your feedline loss isnt eating your gains, i was running like 40 feet of RG-58 initially on the yagi which was dumb. switched to LMR-400 and it made a bigger difference than i expected on 2m. 55 miles is doable with a decent yagi if theres not a mountain in the way