so ive been putting this off for like two months and finally just did it saturday. cut a basic 40m dipole out of some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around from an old extension cord project, used a SO-239 chassis connector i pulled from a parts bin for the center insulator and just drilled it through a piece of scrap pvc. total cost was basically nothing which was the goal.

anyway got it up in an inverted-v config, apex is around 28 feet off the ground which i know isnt ideal for 40 but its what the tree gave me. ran about 35 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. trimmed it according to the 468/f formula and ended up cutting each leg to roughly 33.2 feet and the SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.200 which honestly surprised me, figured id be way off.

my question is the feedpoint impedance on an inverted-v is lower than a flat dipole right? ive read like 50-50 ohm vs closer to maybe 70 at the feedpoint for flat, but with the angle i have (legs are drooping pretty steeply, maybe 120 degrees included angle) does that mean im actually closer to a 50 ohm match naturally without any matching network? or am i just getting lucky with the SWR reading and the coax is eating the mismatch. been second guessing myself on this one.

yeah the inverted-v does drop the feedpoint impedance, the steeper the droop the lower it gets. somewhere around 120 degree included angle youre looking at roughly 50 ohms give or take depending on height and ground conditions and all that. so your 1.4:1 probably isnt the coax masking anything, you genuinely got a decent match. the 468 constant is a starting point anyway, real wire has velocity factor and the insulation on stranded can affect things a little, so trimming is always part of the deal.

the pvc center insulator is totally fine by the way, ive been using the same approach for years. only thing id watch is UV degradation if its in direct sun constantly, schedule 40 holds up better than the thin stuff. sounds like a solid first build honestly.

nice work getting it up. i did almost the exact same thing for my first antenna except i used 12awg and it was way heavier than it needed to be, had a hell of a time keeping tension on the ends without pulling the tree branch down lol. one thing i didnt think about when i first built mine was the effect of nearby stuff, like my swr changed noticeably once i ran the coax along the fence vs hanging it free. might be worth checking if you move anything around it later on just to see if the numbers shift.