"west" wrote in message
...

lot. Tell us what kind of antennas you are thinking of .

A suburban lot is a modest sized lot. Ideally I would have only 2 ant. 1
for
HF & one for 2m/220/440. although I see that there are all in ones
available
but that would make the HF part, vertically polarized. I can forget 160m.
I
know from days of old the QRN was almost intolerable at times with a
vertical. Thanks, Ralph for the post. BTW: I am only interested in
omni-directional at this time.

west

If you can put up a dipole, you may want to try a dipole, either trapped, or
fed with open wire. An off center fed antenna is not bad either. You may
have trouble getting enough wire in the ground for a vertical to work very
well. Putting down 20 to 100 ground wires is more trouble than I care for.
At low heights the dipoles, especially if inverted V types have a very broad
pattern, almost omni-directiona. One thing about the dipoles is you can
buy a bunch of wire at the local store for a small price. If you don't like
it, you have not spent the $ 200-300 for the verticals.

For vhf FM work most any of the dual band verticals seem to be ok. I have
not looked at any that cover the 220 band also. It may be hard to find a
single antenna that will do 144/220/440 . I usually work ssb on the vhf
bands and do very little on the repeaters so that has not been much of an
issue with me. SSB usually requires a horizontal antenna as that is what
most are using and you will take a big (around 20 db) hit going from one to
the other.