so ive been running a 40m dipole at about 35 feet for the last couple years and its been decent, works fine for domestic stuff, but i keep reading that verticals are supposed to be better for dx because of the lower takeoff angle. finally broke down and put up a hamstick vertical on a temporary ground mount with maybe 8 or 10 radials, nothing fancy, just wanted to see if the theory matched reality.

honestly the results are kind of mixed and i dont know what to make of them. on some evenings the vertical is clearly pulling in signals from europe that the dipole just isnt hearing, but then other times the dipole stomps all over it. like last tuesday i was working a pile-up for a JA station and the dipole was clearly the better antenna. i wonder if its just band conditions messing with my perception or if there's actually a real pattern here.

also my radial situation is probably not great. ive read you want 16 or 32 or even 60 radials buried for a real ground mounted vertical to perform right. maybe thats whats holding it back. anyone gone through this kind of comparison and figured out a rule of thumb for when to switch antennas?

yeah this is kind of a classic thing that drives people nuts because there isnt a clean answer. the low angle radiation from a vertical is real but it only helps if the ground quality under and around it is decent and like you said radials matter a lot. 8 or 10 radials is honestly pretty lossy, youre probably giving up several db compared to what the antenna could do. i did a comparison years ago with an mfj antenna analyzer and just measuring feedpoint impedance told me a ton about how my radial system was actually performing.

the other thing is a dipole at 35 feet on 40m is only about 0.25 wavelengths high so it actually has a fairly high takeoff angle too, probably similar to your vertical in some conditions. if you could get that dipole up to 60 or 70 feet you'd probably see a bigger difference. for JA from north america you want a pretty low angle depending on your path so that's not surprising the vertical did well there sometimes.

i went through basically the exact same thing last summer. ended up just leaving both up and using a relay box to switch between them which honestly is the right call if you have the space. running them against each other in real time on the same signal is way more revealing than trying to remember what happened tuesday. W8JI has a bunch of stuff written about this if you havent already gone down that rabbit hole, fair warning its a lot of reading.