so i finally sat down last weekend and built my first real dipole from scratch, 40m cut to the standard half wavelength formula, 468/f and all that. used some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had laying around from an old spool, fed it with about 50 feet of RG-8X through a 1:1 choke balun i wound myself on a type 31 toroid.

the problem is the SWR at resonance is sitting around 1.8:1 which isnt terrible but i was hoping to get it down closer to 1.2 or so. i have it up in kind of an inverted-V configuration with the apex around 30 feet and the ends dropping down to about 10 feet off the ground. the legs arent exactly equal either, one side had to be shortened a bit to go around the garage. i trimmed both ends a couple times trying to get resonance to land on 7.200 and it did get there but that SWR wont budge much below 1.8.

is this just the inverted-V geometry doing this? i know the angle affects the feedpoint impedance. or could it be the balun? i honestly wasnt super confident in my winding job on that toroid, only did about 10 turns of RG-8X and now im second guessing the number of turns. any thoughts appreciated, been at this for two days and starting to wonder if i should just buy a commercial antenna at this point lol

the inverted-V angle is almost certainly your problem. when you bring those legs down that steep the feedpoint impedance drops, can end up anywhere from 35 to maybe 45 ohms depending on the angle, so youre never gonna hit a perfect 50 ohm match no matter how much you trim the wire. 1.8:1 honestly isnt bad for that config and your rig should be fine with it, most tuners will clean it up if you really need to. if you want to chase a lower SWR either get the apex higher so the legs are closer to horizontal or accept the mismatch and move on. the asymmetry from going around the garage probably adds a little to it but not as much as you think.

also 10 turns of RG-8X on a 31 mix toroid is fine for 40m, that part isnt your issue.

I went through basically the exact same thing with my first inverted-V, obsessed over getting the SWR perfect and eventually a guy at my club just told me to stop worrying about it. 1.8 isnt going to hurt anything and on 40m you probably wont notice a difference in signal reports vs a 1.1 match. the antenna is up and it works, which puts you ahead of a lot of people. I spent like three weekends tweaking mine before I just accepted it and started actually using the thing to make contacts.

one thing though — how is the feedline routed? if the coax is just drooping down along one of the legs for a while that can skew your readings depending on where your analyzer is. might be worth checking that if you havent already.