so ive been putting this off for like a year but i finally got around to building a 40m dipole from scratch. used about 66 feet of 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had laying around from an old electrical project, cut it roughly in half and tied it off to a center insulator i made from a chunk of pvc pipe i drilled through. nothing fancy but it went up yesterday afternoon.

heres where im second guessing myself though. the feedpoint is sitting at maybe 25 feet in the middle and the ends are drooping down quite a bit, probably closer to 15 feet off the ground. i know an inverted V isnt ideal but its what i had to work with. the SWR on 40 is reading around 1.8:1 at the freq i cut it for which honestly isnt terrible but i keep reading that a proper dipole should get closer to 1.5 or even lower. im wondering if the droop on the ends is killing me or if its something with the feedpoint connection.

also i just twisted the coax center conductor and shield braid around the two wire ends and used some electrical tape to weatherproof it. is that sketchy or does that actually hold up okay? feel like i should solder it but i dont have a good outdoor setup for that right now.

the inverted V angle is probably why youre seeing 1.8 instead of lower, when the legs drop below about 120 degrees between them the feedpoint impedance starts moving away from that 50 ohm sweet spot. 25 feet at the apex isnt bad but if your ends are at 15 you might be at a pretty steep angle. nothing wrong with 1.8 though honestly, most tuners will handle that no problem and youre not losing much power to the mismatch.

the twisted connection thing, yeah i wouldnt leave that long term. tape lets moisture in eventually and corrosion on the center conductor will creep up inside the coax before you even notice the SWR climbing. if you can get a PL-259 on there and use a barrel connector at the feedpoint thats cleaner, or even just solder it and use self-amalgamating tape rather than electrical tape. self-amalgamating stuff is actually waterproof and holds up way better outside.

1.8 on a first dipole is pretty solid tbh. my first one was reading like 3.5 and i had no idea what i was doing wrong for weeks, turned out i measured from the wrong end of the coax lol. what radio are you running it into? if its got a built in tuner it'll flatten that right out.