so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here. i have a decent hilltop site about 1800ft asl that i can get access to maybe once or twice a month, and im trying to decide whether to just haul a collinear up there for general use or build a yagi and deal with the aiming hassle.

the thing is im not doing serious EME or anything, mostly just trying to work stations out to maybe 150-200 miles on 2m and 70cm. sometimes ill do a bit of contest operating if theres something going on that weekend. the collinear is obviously way simpler because i can just plop it on the mast and forget about it but i feel like im giving up a lot of gain for that convenience.

right now i have a diamond x50 that i use at home and honestly its fine for local stuff but it doesnt really cut it when i want to push the distance. was thinking about a 5 element yagi on 2m, maybe something homebrew or a cheap cushcraft. anyone actually done a side by side comparison from a portable hilltop setup? curious what the practical difference feels like, not just the numbers on paper.

honestly from a good hilltop the yagi is going to be night and day compared to a collinear for that distance work, like there's really no contest. a 5el on 2m is probably going to give you somewhere around 7-8 dBd which sounds modest but the difference between that and 3dBd from a decent collinear is very noticeable on marginal paths. the problem you already identified is real though, aiming matters a lot and if you're just casually operating and not sure where the signals are coming from you'll spend half your time rotating it by hand.

what i ended up doing for portable hilltop stuff is building a small 6el yagi on a painters pole with a simple PVC cross brace at the bottom, the whole thing breaks down and fits in the back of my hatchback. takes maybe 10 minutes to set up. for 70cm i run a short 9el and they share a mast. if you plan on doing vhf contests even occasionally the yagi setup pays off fast.

the x50 is a solid antenna but yeah you're kind of at its ceiling for that kind of range. i had a similar situation and went with a yagi and dont regret it at all. one thing though, make sure whatever feedline you run is decent coax because on 70cm especially you can lose a lot of your gain advantage in crappy RG-58 real quick. i learned that the hard way