I've had a horizontal dipole for the 11m band (about 50 or 60 ft high) for some time now, it works well for DX, but I thought perhaps not as well for more close in / local reception, which would tend to be vertically polarized.
I debated a bit as to what kind of antenna to set up, a ground plane, j-pole, or vertical dipole were the top three choices I came up with. Some research online quickly eliminated the j-pole, as it is a problematic antenna that often does not live up to the hype. That left the ground plane and vertical dipole. A ground plane antenna is nothing more than half a dipole with the ground plane acting to provide the missing element via a mirror, yet more complicated to build. So that left the vertically oriented dipole.
The next question was whether to make a folded dipole out of 300 ohm ladder line / twin lead (which is what my horizontal 11m dipole is made from, and fed with a 4:1 transformer, as is my 43mb dipole) or just a regular dipole. I ordered the 300 ohm line, but then pondered it a bit, and after some discussions with Radio GaGa, decided to go with regular wire, both for ease of construction as well as not having to wait for the 300 ohm line to arrive (hey, anyone want to buy some 300 ohm line??)
Being cheap, I looked around for some scraps of wire, and found I had two lengths of #10 insulated stranded wire that were long enough. The nice thing about the 11m band is that wavelengths are short enough that scraps of wire are all you need. I cut each wire 8 ft 7 inches, plus a little extra to go around the insulator on each end (I stripped the insulation off that part so that I could wrap it around the wire and both hold it in place as well as short out, so as to not make the wire longer than needed).
For the feedpoint I made a custom version of one of my Cyclops transformers (
https://www.blackcatsystems.com/rf-products/cyclops_rf_ham_shortwave_radio_matching_transformer.html ), with a 1:1 turns ratio, as the feedpoint of a half wave dipole is about 70 ohms at resonance (insert hand waving to ignore the effect of the ground on impedance) and I'm feeding it with 75 ohm RG-6 coax.
I installed it this morning, and am pleased so far. It does seem to be more sensitive for the local & semi local stations vs the horizontal dipole. I ran both antennas for a while on two different but comparable SDRs, with the audio from one going out the left speaker and the other out the right.
I notice it picks up less RFI than the horizontal dipole, but that could just be due to where in the yard it is located. The feedpoint is at about a 35 ft height, I used an existing rope I had in a tree as the weather really isn't conducive to getting out the Big Shot to launch another rope higher. Once the weather improves I may do that and see if I notice any favorable difference. Additional height should improve line of sight reception, but OTOH the takeoff angle portion of the radiation pattern is dependent on the height, and a higher antenna is not always better from that point of view.