Yes!
I would like to stress that for a SOTA antenna, theoretical efficiency is only one of the many variables for its actual usefulness and performance. In my SOTA antenna projects, I now tend to start with what is doable from the perspective of handling and then test whether it works sufficiently well. For instance, my two SOTA vertical designs:
- Superlight SOTA Vertical for 40-30-20m with Loading Coil by mfhepp - Thingiverse
- SOTA 3-Band Vertical Antenne with Loading Coil by mfhepp - Thingiverse
are mainly inspired by an optimized handing on small or crowded summits. They are less performant than a full-size dipole (center-fed or endfed), but in practice, I can manage more QSOs on a challenging summit because I am QRV within 1 - 2 minutes. Still, I can work @SP9AMH with QRP2QRP regularly.
A dipole / EFHW with traps might be a little less efficient than a linked dipole. But when in a hurry on a summit, the antenna with traps allows me trying for a nice DX catch on 20m at the end of an activation in winter in a few more minutes, while I would not have the time to take down the antenna for a band-change.
As for the “any antenna design works” argument, I think we should add that this is true as long as you do not make any mistake building and tuning it: If you just look for a low SWR, you may never notice very bad construction mistakes that cause a lot of losses, for instance
- long coax for sections with a very different impedance from 50 ohms,
- shorts or cold solder joints,
- core losses,
- capacitative coupling into nearby metal or otherwise conductive objects,
etc.
So a WSPR performance comparison against a reference design is always useful. Low SWR just assures an impedance match to the transceiver, so that the finals do not get blown away. 80 % of your antenna can be actually a dummy load, while you can still achieve a 1:1 SWR, as any full dummy loads proves.
73 de Martin, DK3IT