so i finally got around to building my first dipole from scratch, been putting it off forever because i kept telling myself i'd mess it up. used 14 AWG stranded wire i had leftover from some electrical work, cut each leg to about 16.4 feet for 40m based on the 468/f formula. fed it with some RG-8X i had lying around and threw together a basic center insulator out of a piece of PVC flat stock i drilled holes through.

hoisted it up in an inverted-V config with the apex at around 25 feet (thats all my pushup mast will do) and the ends tied off to a couple of trees maybe 8 feet off the ground. antenna analyzer shows the resonant point sitting around 6.9 MHz instead of 7.150 like i was aiming for, so SWR at the low end of 40m is like 1.4:1 which honestly isnt terrible but the resonance is clearly off.

did a few contacts yesterday, including one guy in ontario that gave me a solid 57 so the thing is obviously radiating. just wondering if i should bother trimming the legs to move resonance up or leave it since the rig's internal tuner handles it fine. also not sure if the inverted-V angle is killing my efficiency, the legs are probably only at like 100 degrees included angle or so.

the inverted-V angle is fine at 100 degrees, honestly anything above 90 is workable and you're not going to notice the difference on 40m from a flat dipole at that height anyway. 25 feet apex on 40 is pretty low so youre mostly getting nvis radiation which is actually great for regional contacts, explains the ontario qso probably.

as for the resonance being low, that's almost certainly because of the inverted-V configuration itself, the legs being angled down effectively makes the antenna act electrically longer than a flat dipole of the same length. pretty common to need to trim a bit when you go from calculating for a flat dipole to actually hanging it as an inverted-V. if the tuner handles it i wouldn't stress too much, but if you want to clean it up just trim maybe half inch at a time off each end, re-check with the analyzer, repeat. don't trim too aggressively, easier to take off than add back.

stranded wire is fine btw, some people swear by solid but ive never noticed a real world difference at hf frequencies.

yeah what he said about the inverted V making it electrically longer is spot on, i ran into the exact same thing with my first build. ended up having to trim like 3 inches total off each leg to get it where i wanted it.

also just curious what you used for the balun situation, did you put a current balun at the feedpoint or just run the coax straight to the center insulator? i skipped the balun on my first one and had rf coming back down the coax shield and into the shack, took me way too long to figure out what was causing the weird rf feedback on my mic.