so i relocated my 40m dipole a few weeks ago, moved it from a more or less flat inverted-v configuration centered on a 30ft mast to kind of a sloper setup because i ran out of room on the other side of the yard after we got a new shed put in. its still about 66ft total length which should be right but my SWR is all over the place now and im getting like 3.5:1 at the feedpoint on 7.150 which is where i normally hang out. before the move it was pretty flat, maybe 1.4:1 across most of the band.

ive checked the feedline connections and they look fine, coax is the same run of LMR-400 i had before, maybe 75ft of it going back to the shack. the far end of the dipole is lower than it used to be, probably only about 15ft off the ground at the drooping end, and im wondering if thats whats killing me. or maybe the angle of the sloper is doing something weird with the impedance? i dont have an antenna analyzer right now, borrowed one before and thats how i got the original tune. just using the rig's built in meter.

any thoughts before i climb back up there and start messing with lengths again

yeah the height thing is almost certainly your problem, or at least a big part of it. when you drop that far end down to 15ft you're putting part of the antenna really close to ground and that's going to shift the resonant frequency down and change the feedpoint impedance noticeably. a dipole close to ground doesn't really see the same 72 ohm impedance it would higher up, ground losses and capacitive coupling to the earth start pulling things around.

the sloper angle itself can also matter more than people expect. if it's a true sloper (one end high, other end lower in a straight run) those can have some interesting radiation pattern effects and the impedance at the feedpoint tends to run lower than a flat dipole, sometimes down in the 30-50 ohm range depending on the angle and height. worth trimming a bit and seeing where it lands. if you can borrow that analyzer again even for an afternoon it would tell you a lot more than the rig's meter will, those built-in SWR meters arent super accurate below like 2:1 anyway.

i had something similar happen when i put up a sloper for 80m, fought it for like two weeks before i figured out the coax shield was acting as part of the antenna because i didnt have a choke balun at the feedpoint. the current was coming back down the outside of the coax and depending on how the cable was routed it completely changed things. might be worth throwing a few ferrite cores on there near the feedpoint if you havent already, or winding a choke out of the coax itself, even a few turns can make a difference.