  The LOPES experiment was a radio interferometer built at the existing air
shower array KASCADE-Grande in Karlsruhe, Germany. The last configuration of
LOPES was called LOPES 3D and consisted of ten tripole antennas. Each of these
antennas consisted of three crossed dipoles east-west, north-south, and
vertically aligned. With this, LOPES 3D had the unique possibility to study the
benefits of measurements with vertically aligned antennas in the environment of
the well understood and calibrated particle detector array KASCADE-Grande. The
measurements with three spatially coincident antennas allows a redundant
reconstruction of the electric field vector. Several methods to exploit the
redundancy were developed and tested. Furthermore, for the first time in LOPES,
the background noise could be studied polarization- and direction dependent.
With LOPES 3D it could be demonstrated that radio detection reaches a higher
efficiency for inclined showers when including measurements with vertically
aligned antennas and that the vertical component gets more important for the
measurement of inclined showers. In this contribution we discuss a weighting
scheme for the best combination of three redundant reconstructed electric field
vectors. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of these weighting schemes on
the ability to reconstruct air showers using the radio method. We show an
estimate of the radio efficiency for inclined showers with focus on the
benefits of measurements with vertically aligned antennas and we present the
direction dependent noise in the different polarizations.
