so i finally stopped procrastinating and just built a simple 40m dipole out of some leftover 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33 feet going by the old 468/f formula, got some SO-239 connectors from the junk drawer and soldered everything up. hoisted it up in an inverted V configuration with the apex at maybe 25 feet off the ground, fed with about 50 feet of RG-8X down to the shack.

thing actually works, got my first contacts on it this morning which was pretty exciting. but im seeing like 2.1:1 SWR at the bottom of the band and it creeps up to almost 3:1 by the time i get to 7.3 MHz. i know thats not terrible and the tuner handles it fine but i was hoping to get a better match across the band without always reaching for the tuner. is this just what you expect from a dipole at that height or should i be trimming the legs more? i havent touched the length since i put it up, figured id ask before i start cutting.

also the feed point connection is just two solder joints on the SO-239 center and the shield lug, no balun or anything. not sure if that matters. read some stuff about common mode current but honestly wasnt sure if it applied here or not.

2.1 at the low end and climbing to 3:1 toward 7.3 is pretty normal for a dipole that height, the inverted V geometry and proximity to ground both shift things around. if you want better SWR at a specific part of the band you can trim small amounts off each leg and retune but honestly for general 40m operation most people just run a tuner and call it done. the bandwidth of a 40m dipole isnt huge to begin with.

the balun thing though, yeah you should probably throw a 1:1 choke balun or even just wind some of that coax into a choke at the feed point. without it you can get RF on the shield coming back into the shack and it can mess with your SWR readings, cause RFI on the computer, all kinds of annoying stuff. doesnt have to be anything fancy, even 8-10 turns of coax wound into a coil and zip-tied near the feed point helps a lot. some guys use a few ferrite cores slipped over the coax. either way its worth doing before you assume your trim job is finished because the readings can be off without one.

yeah same thing happened with my first dipole, spent way too long trimming when really the tuner just handles it. 3:1 isnt going to kill anything and most rigs these days are fine up to 3:1 or even a little higher without a tuner anyway. if you really want to flatten it out try raising the apex, height does a surprising amount. i went from an inverted V at 20 feet to closer to 35 and the SWR curve changed noticeably. also fwiw i ran without a balun for probably a year before i added one and didnt notice a huge difference in contacts but the RF in the shack thing is real, my keyboard was doing weird stuff that turned out to be exactly that.