My activator philosophy: I accept my temporary on-summit antenna setups will compromise performance somewhat for small weight & packed volume and speed & ease of deployment.
For many years I used my EFHWs (40/30/20 and 40/20/10) as slopers, fed either at top of mast (via 10m of RG714 coax) or bottom end (elevated by bush or rock if possible) via 2m of coax and got good results with 10W CW (judged by reports received and given) using either feed point, e.g. N/American QSOs on 10m last October….
After many reflector bloggers praised the inverted-L EFHW configuration over slopers, I switched to inverted-L with feed point at the bottom of the pole (with 2m coax to rig). I get very good results but – without doing an A vs B comparison (which I can’t do as I don’t have two identical EFHWs) – and with so many confounding variables - I honestly can’t tell if there’s an improvement over the slopers.
I did compare the EFHW inv-L vs my Cha MPAS Lite vertical. Neither was clearly better than the other although the former ‘won on points’. The vertical when used with my KX2/int-ATU has many good features (robustness, ease of deployment, small footprint) so I still use it a lot, e.g, when doing 30m and 10m.
IMO: unless you are contesting or chasing rare Dx:
- Feed your EFHW at the wire end that’s convenient for you
- [To paraphrase that much-quoted saying] your best antenna is the one you packed. I like to pick and choose for each occasion