so ive been doing a lot of SOTA activations lately and mostly using a slim jim rolled up in my pack for 2m which works fine for hitting the local repeaters but i keep hearing about guys running yagis up there and making way more contacts especially on simplex during contests and stuff

the thing is i already have a 5el dual band yagi i built from a design i found a few years back, pretty sure its tuned decent, tested it at home and the swr looked fine but i never really did a proper gain measurement or anything. its not huge but its still a pain to haul compared to just the slim jim coiled up

my question is basically - for portable hilltop work is the yagi actually worth dragging up or is a decent collinear going to do about the same thing if im already at elevation? i feel like elevation does a lot of the work anyway but i genuinely dont know if im leaving significant contacts on the table by not using the beam. especially for 70cm where my slim jim is kinda sketchy anyway

using an ft-60 mostly, sometimes a vx-6r if the battery situation is different. not a lot of power obviously so antenna gain actually matters more than it would on hf i guess

elevation definitely does a ton of the work your right about that, but theres a real difference between a collinear and a yagi that elevation alone cant make up for - especially on 70cm. a collinear is still omnidirectional so youre spreading that signal everywhere, including directions you dont care about. a 5el yagi on 2m is going to give you somewhere around 7-8dBd depending on the design and thats not nothing when youre running 5 watts

for SOTA specifically i think it depends what your goal is. hitting repeaters and making a quick activation, the slim jim or a jpole is honestly fine. but if youre trying to work weak signal simplex contacts or reach someone 150+ miles out during a contest, the yagi is going to make a noticeable difference. ive worked some surprisingly long paths from hilltops with modest yagis that i never would have closed with an omni

the 70cm point is the bigger deal imo. a slim jim on 70cm at those power levels is going to have a rougher time than 2m just due to path loss scaling, so if youre serious about 70 the yagi is probably worth it

yeah i went through this exact debate last summer. ended up just bringing both on a few activations to compare and honestly the yagi won pretty clearly for anything beyond like 80 miles. closer than that the omni was totally fine and way less annoying to set up

one thing i did was mount the yagi on a cheap painters pole with a camera mount adapter, breaks down small enough to not be terrible in a pack. the weight is more the issue than the length for me