so ive been running a 40m dipole for about two years now, center fed with 450 ohm ladder line into a tuner, works pretty well but its only up about 25 feet which i know isnt ideal. friend of mine keeps telling me to put up a vertical instead, says ill get better dx with it because of the low angle radiation. he's got a hustler 4BTV and swears by it.

thing is i dont have a great ground here. the yard is kind of rocky and i managed to get maybe 16 radials down but theyre only like 10-12 feet long each, not the 32 quarter wave radials everybody talks about. so im wondering if the vertical with a mediocre ground system is actually going to outperform the dipole at low angles or if the ground losses are going to eat up whatever advantage the vertical theoretically has

ive modeled both in 4nec2 but honestly im not super confident i set up the ground parameters right so the numbers feel kind of made up at this point. anybody run both and have a real world take on it

the short answer is probably not, at least not with only 16 short radials. ground losses on a vertical can really kill you and those radials being under a quarter wave doesn't help. there's some NEC modeling work that shows diminishing returns past about 16-20 radials but only if they're at least a quarter wave long. yours are less than half that so you're leaving a lot on the table.

that said a dipole at 25 feet on 40m is pretty much NVIS territory, like your radiation angle is going to be steep and you'll work stations but probably not the deep dx your buddy is pulling. if dx is the goal neither setup is ideal honestly. the dipole needs to be up around 65-70 feet to really start getting competitive low angle radiation on 40 and the vertical needs a real ground system to shine.

what i'd actually do in your situation is keep the dipole and just start adding more radials slowly, doesn't have to happen all at once. once you get to like 30 quarter wave ones the vertical starts to make more sense. running both and switching is also a perfectly valid strategy, different antennas for different situations.

yeah this is kind of my situation too actually. i went back and forth on this for months. ended up keeping the dipole because at 25ft on 40m i was still working plenty of europe from the midwest, maybe not every day but enough that i didn't feel like i was missing out badly. the vertical just seemed like a money and labor pit with my soil conditions.

one thing i havent seen mentioned - if you can get the dipole ends higher by sloping them at all that can help a bit with lower angle stuff, not as much as just getting it higher overall but its free