so i finally stopped procrastinating and just built a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 awg stranded wire i had laying around in the garage. used a piece of pvc pipe as the center insulator and drilled a hole through it for the SO-239. nothing fancy.

got it up about 25 feet in an inverted V configuration tied off to my chimney on one end and a tree on the other. swr came out around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which i was pretty happy with honestly. trimmed a little off each leg and got it down to like 1.2:1.

my question is about the feedpoint connection itself. i just soldered the braid of the coax to one leg and center conductor to the other. no balun. ive been reading conflicting stuff about whether you actually need one for a simple dipole like this or if its overkill for casual use. rf seems fine and im getting decent reports on 40m ssb but im wondering if im missing something or if the feedline is radiating and im just not noticing it.

also not sure if i should have used something heavier gauge for the elements, the 14awg feels kind of light but it was what i had

14awg stranded is totally fine for a wire dipole, honestly i've run 18awg for years without any issues on power levels up to about 100w. the wire gauge really only matters much if you're running high power or want something more mechanically durable for long term outdoor use.

on the balun question — it depends. for an inverted V fed with coax you're technically running an unbalanced line to a balanced antenna, so some rf can end up on the outside of the braid and come back into the shack which can cause all kinds of weird rfi issues, rf in the audio, swr that changes when you touch the radio, that kind of thing. if everything seems fine and your swr is stable i wouldn't stress about it too much right now but eventually its worth throwing a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint just to clean things up. you can wind your own with a ferrite toroid pretty cheap, type 31 or type 43 material works well for hf.

sounds like a solid first build though, 1.2:1 on the first try is better than a lot of people do

yeah i went through the same thing with my first dipole, didnt bother with a balun and it worked fine but i had this weird thing where my swr would jump around depending on whether i was sitting close to the radio or not. turned out to be rf on the coax coming back in. wound a simple ugly balun with like 8 turns of the coax itself through a piece of type 31 ferrite and it totally fixed it. took maybe 20 minutes to make.

anyway your setup sounds good for 40m, i'd try it on 15m too since a 40m dipole is a decent 15m antenna at odd angles which can be kinda fun for dx if you're into that