A vertical antenna on 80 meters is great if you want to work 80 meter DX. For close-in work (out to several hundred miles) it will perform quite poorly due to the fact that almost no power is radiated upwards. Most work on 80 meters is done by near-vertical-incedence (NVI) propagation (local and state-wide nets, etc.) For that, a horizontal works best. Harvey/W4TG