so ive been putting this off for like a year and finally just did it last weekend. cut a basic 40m dipole from some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around in the garage, used a SO-239 chassis connector as the center insulator (yeah i know, not ideal but it works), and hung it inverted-V off a 25ft fiberglass push-up mast in the backyard.

got it up and the swr on resonance came out around 1.4:1 which honestly surprised me, i expected worse for a first attempt. but heres my question — the feedpoint ends up being maybe 18-19ft off the ground at the apex and the ends are only like 8 feet up. ive read that the low angle radiation from an inverted-V suffers compared to a flat top dipole but does the height of the apex matter more than the ends or is it kind of both? also i used about 40ft of RG-8X as the feedline and didnt bother with a balun yet. running it to the shack through a window opening and when i key up on 40m i can kind of feel a tingle on the chassis of the radio sometimes. not every time but sometimes. guessing thats RF on the coax shield from no balun?

anyway the thing actually works, made a handful of contacts last night including one down in Florida from Michigan which i was pretty happy with. just want to dial it in a bit before i call it done.

yeah that tingle is almost certainly RF on the braid, get a choke balun on there before you do much more operating. seriously dont mess around with that, its not dangerous in the way people dramatize it but its also just not great and it means your coax shield is probably radiating which messes with your pattern anyway. for a 40m inverted-V a simple ugly balun — just coil up 8-10 turns of the feedline at the feedpoint — works surprisingly well and costs you nothing since you already have the coax.

on the height question, yeah the apex matters more than the ends for your radiation angle. the ends being low is fine, they contribute less to the far field pattern than the center portion of the dipole does. if you can get that apex to 30-35ft youll notice a real difference on DX but for stateside stuff on 40m at 19ft honestly youre not missing that much, especially inverted-V which already has a higher angle anyway. good first build though, 1.4:1 at resonance is solid.

nice work getting it up. i built basically the same thing last summer except i used speaker wire for the elements because i ran out of real antenna wire and didnt feel like driving to the store lol. worked fine for a while until one of the conductors broke at the feedpoint after a windstorm, so just something to watch out for with stranded wire and vibration over time.

also florida from michigan on 40m at night is nothing to write home about propagation-wise but still feels good when your homebrew antenna actually does the thing its supposed to do