I agree with Bill, and hundreds of others, that inverted L's can work well. I did a presentation on what my research came up with to make one work well here in the poor ground of South Carolina. A video of a talk to the DDCC about that can be found here.
Low Band Vertical Antenna Decisions at N4XL.: Deep Dixie Contest Club
It's not technical enough for many people, but many have appreciated the more general lessons it contains. It's a long talk.
Also worth looking at is N6LF's web pages at
The ones for QEX about his ground radial system experiments.
Some key take away points from all that research came from those N6LF experiments and ARRL charts about the number and length of ground radials and Radiation Resistance. Some disagree with me, but these have become my talking points.
1) Make the vertical height be as high as possible. Not as high as convenient, as high as you can. That makes radiation resistance be high and reduces the effects of ground losses.
2) 32 radials seems to be a reasonable bang for the buck cutoff point. Of course, the more the better your results.
3) Until you lay down more than 32, length isn't all that important. 1/8 wave is fine and you're mainly wasting wire to try and get more gain by laying out longer ones. You're better off laying a lot of short ones then a small number of longer ones.
I had tried three other 160 antennas before putting up this one. I now have 65 ft vertical and 60 ft horizontal and 45 variable length buried radials. Haven't done a full time 160 effort yet, but in the few domestic contests I've played in I find with only 100 watts I can run at the 80+ q/hr rate (CW easier then SSB of course), have worked several on the west coast when others in SC say they could barely hear them, and have improved 160 DX totals by 4-5 times over what I used to get with previous antennas. Even K4BAI manages to find me every time. Oh wait... That happens anyway. John is just phenomenal.
Of course, YMMV.
Kevan N4XL