so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i cant decide. currently running a 40m dipole fed with coax, works decent but i have some feedline issues i suspect and my shack is at one end of the property which makes centering the thing a pain. someone at the club suggested just going end fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun and running the wire along the fence line but im skeptical because every time i read about end feds people either love them or say theyre garbage and there doesnt seem to be much in between

the dipole right now is maybe 25 feet up at center, droops a bit toward the ends, not really an inverted V but not flat top either, just kind of... a sad shape. SWR is acceptable on 40 but pretty bad on 80 which id also like to use. the feedline run to the shack is probably 75 feet of RG-8X and theres a PL-259 that i soldered myself that im not 100% confident in

not looking for perfection, just want something reliable that i can work some DX with on 40 and maybe get on 80 occasionally. does the end fed actually perform comparably or am i going to regret losing the balanced feed

the end fed can work fine but the 9:1 unun thing kind of bugs me — a lot of those homebrew and cheap commercial ones are lossy and people dont realize it. what you actually want for a true EFHW is a 49:1 transformer, not 9:1, the 9:1 is more for random wires. if youre going end fed halfwave for 40 you need about 66 feet of wire and a good 49:1 matchbox and then yeah the SWR flattens out pretty nicely. i built one with an FT240-43 core and it honestly works great, maybe a dB or two behind my dipole but nothing that would stop a QSO

that said your sad shaped dipole probably isnt as bad as you think. 25 feet center on 40 is low but workable, and if the coax and that connector are suspect thats where id start before changing the whole antenna. resolder that PL-259 or better yet put an N connector on there and see if anything changes first

i switched from a dipole to an EFHW last year and honestly cant tell the difference most of the time on 40. 80 is a bit worse maybe but i didnt have a great dipole for 80 either so hard to say. the convenience of running it along the fence was worth it for my situation, neighbor on one side is not a fan of visible wire antennas so keeping it low and along the fence helped a lot