so ive been running an inverted V for 40m for about two years now, apex at around 35 feet with the legs drooping down to about 8 feet at each end. works fine, gets me in QSOs, no complaints really. but my neighbor (also a ham, K8 something, old timer) keeps telling me i should try a flat top dipole instead and that the inverted V is "wasting radiation at high angles" or whatever. he's not wrong probably but i also dont have a second tall support anywhere near 35 feet so a flat top would mean both ends at like 20 feet max which seems worse.

ran this through EZNEC a little bit and honestly the patterns look pretty similar at my heights, the flat top maybe has a slight edge for DX but nothing dramatic. i feel like at these suburban lot heights the debate is kind of academic? like yeah in theory the flat top wins but when youre limited to what you got the inverted V is probably fine. curious what other people think or if anyone has actually A/B tested this in a real setup not just modeling.

yeah your modeling is probably right. at 35 feet on 40m you're not getting a low-angle DX killer no matter what configuration you use - the flat top at 20 feet would actually be worse in almost every metric. the inverted V at least gets your feedpoint up high. i ran both configs here for a while, had a temporary support situation where i could compare back to back and honestly the difference in real-world contacts was basically nil. maybe the flat top felt slightly louder on some European signals but that could easily be propagation variation fooling me.

your neighbor isnt wrong as a general principle but general principles assume you have the supports to do it right. work with what you have.

i modeled this exact scenario a while back when i was trying to decide the same thing, and the takeaway i got was that the inverted V loses maybe 1-2 dB at low angles compared to a flat dipole at the same apex height, but if you're comparing inverted V apex at 35ft vs flat top at 20ft the inverted V actually wins on low angle radiation. so yeah you're already making the right call without even realizing it lol. the other thing nobody mentions is that the inverted V's narrower feed impedance variation across frequency can make it a bit easier to tune if youre using a tuner, depending on the feedline situation.