Experiment

Built an experimental antenna today.  It's a vertical 1/4 wave (5.2m of wire) on 14MHz (20m band) with 24 radials of approx 3m.  I'm supporting it with a fiberglass pole and guying I usually use for portable operations.

I got it tuned up (the right length) with help from a NanoVNA antenna analyser and once connected to the radio it had nice low SWR - in fact almost an exact match for the theoretical limit for this antenna type.

Generally the reception is similar to the 20m element of my fan dipole.  There's fractionally more noise, and while there are a few signals stronger on the vertical, there's no question that if I had to choose one I'd take the dipole, in spite of its compromise installation.  I worked a few European stations (Bulgaria, Serbia, France, Bosnia) and signal reports were either similar or favoured the dipole.  

The reason for this experiment is partly to see if having a (better version of a) vertical antenna would have value.

I suspect that in good band conditions the vertical might have better DX (long distance) performance, and fill in some deaf spots arising from the orientation of the dipole, but little evidence to support that from today's experimentation.

If all this (and other) experiments do is validate that my fan dipole is doing a great job, that's still worthwhile...

I suspect that a ground loop receive antenna might give some interesting results, but still waiting on the arrival of some components so I can build an isolation transformer for that experiment...