so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my current setup is a trap vertical thats been up for maybe 3 years and it works ok on 40 but ive always had this nagging feeling im leaving a few db on the table compared to a full quarter wave. problem is a full size 40m vertical is like 33 feet and i have neighbors who already give me the look when they see anything going up in the yard.

been looking at the hustler 6btv vs just building a simple quarter wave out of aluminum tubing with a few radials. the loaded coil designs always seem to sacrifice something, whether its efficiency or bandwidth or both. i talked to a guy at the last club meeting who swore his loaded vertical was just as good as his old full size but i dont know, seemed like he was maybe comparing it to a bad radial system on the old one and not really apples to apples.

has anyone actually done a real comparison side by side with like an antenna analyzer and some actual on air testing, not just theoretical stuff? i know the theory says full size wins but wondering how bad the loss actually is in practice when you have a decent coil Q

done this exact comparison a few years back when i was messing around with a screwdriver antenna vs a full size vertical i had in a temporary field setup. short answer is yeah you lose something but probably not as much as you'd think if the coil is decent quality. i measured maybe 2-3db difference on 40m in actual signal reports, not analsyer stuff, and that was with a pretty mediocre loading coil. with a high Q coil wound on a good form i'd guess you could get within a db or so.

the bandwidth thing is the bigger annoyance honestly. full size covers the whole 40m band without a tuner, loaded design can get narrow fast depending on where the coil sits on the antenna. if you're mostly doing one thing like cw at the bottom or ssb in the middle it's manageable but if you like to wander around you'll be retuning constantly. radial system matters way more than people give it credit for btw, ive seen full size verticals with 4 crappy radials lose to a loaded antenna with 32 good ones.

i just built a full size quarter wave for 40 last fall out of a telescoping fiberglass pole with wire along the outside and honestly it wasnt as hard to hide as i expected. painted the pole a dark green and from the street you basically cant see it. might be worth trying before you go the loaded route. mine has 16 radials on the ground and it really does work noticeably better than my old trap vertical did, at least to my ears on the bands