so ive been putting off building my own antenna for probably two years now, always just figured id buy something but the prices for a decent trapped vertical are getting stupid and honestly how hard can a dipole be right

anyway i pulled out some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage, not sure if its copper clad or solid copper, the insulation is like a reddish color if that helps anyone identify it. my plan is to cut it for 40 meters, feed it with some RG-8X i have leftover from a mobile install, and hang it in an inverted-V configuration off my garage peak which puts the feedpoint at maybe 22 feet. the legs would slope down to about 8 feet on each end tied off to fence posts.

my questions are basically — does the wire type matter that much, is 22 feet high enough for the inverted V to do anything useful on 40, and do i need a 1:1 balun at the feedpoint or can i just solder the coax directly and call it good. ive read like four different things about baluns and im more confused now than before i started reading

wire type matters but not as much as people make it sound for a first build. stranded copper or copper clad is totally fine, solid copper is slightly better for permanent installs because it doesnt fatigue as fast in wind but honestly for learning purposes just use what you have. if the wire has decent conductivity youre good.

22 feet for an inverted V on 40 is a bit low but its not gonna be a boat anchor either. youll lose some low angle radiation which hurts DX but for regional contacts and nets its perfectly workable. i ran one at about 25 feet for years before i put up a proper tower and worked plenty of stuff. the angle of the legs matters too — try to keep them at least 120 degrees included angle between them if you can, shallower angles start killing your radiation resistance.

on the balun question — technically you should use a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint to keep RF off the coax shield, otherwise the feedline becomes part of the antenna and does weird things to your pattern and can cause RFI in the house. that said i know guys who have run dipoles for years with no balun and they work fine. for a first build id say just get it up and see how it tunes, you can always add a choke later. winding a few turns of the coax into a coil near the feedpoint helps some too if you dont want to build or buy a balun right away

yeah what he said about the balun, i skipped it on my first dipole and had RF coming back into my shack on certain frequencies, wasnt a huge deal but it was annoying. added a ugly balun (just coax wound into a coil) and it mostly went away.

one thing nobody mentioned — when you cut for 40m dont forget to account for the velocity factor of the wire itself, the standard formula gives you a free space length but wire antennas are usually a few percent shorter in practice. i usually start about 5% longer than the formula says and trim down while watching the SWR on a analyzer. way easier to trim than to splice more wire on lol. also if your wire is insulated there's an additional shortening effect from the dielectric, not huge but it adds up