so i finally got around to building my first homebrew dipole from scratch, been putting it off for months. used some 14awg stranded copper wire i had sitting around in the garage, cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula. center insulator is just a piece of pvc i drilled holes through and fed the wires through, nothing fancy.

hung it inverted-v style off a 25 foot fiberglass mast in the backyard, ends tied off to fence posts with some nylon rope. got it up and connected the coax and threw it at my analyzer and its showing about 1.8:1 at 7.150 which honestly i was not expecting to be that close right out of the gate. but heres the thing, it seems like the resonant point is sitting around 7.080 or so, swr dips to like 1.3:1 there. im guessing i just need to trim a bit off each leg to shift it up?

also the feed point situation is kinda janky right now, i just twisted the coax braid and center to the wire ends and wrapped it with electrical tape. been reading about baluns and i know i should probably add one, would a 1:1 choke balun wound on a toroid be the right move here or is there a simpler way to do it? dont have a lot of ferrite cores on hand but i could wind one with coax on a pvc form if thats good enough for 40m.

yeah you want to trim to move the resonant point up, just take a little off each side evenly, maybe half inch at a time and recheck. dont go crazy or youll end up too high and have to start over with new wire. at 33.5 feet per leg youve got some room to work with before you hit 7.2 or wherever you want the dip.

for the balun, the coax choke wound on pvc works fine for 40m, some people swear by 8-10 turns on a 4 inch form. the toroids are better but if you dont have them on hand the air wound version will get the job done. the main thing is just having something there so the coax shield stops radiating, especially with an inverted-v the coax coming straight down from the feedpoint without a choke can do weird things to your pattern and mess with your swr readings too which might explain why your numbers look a little different depending on how you handle the coax near the antenna.

i did basically the same build last spring but used 12 gauge solid wire from home depot and it holds up way better in the wind, the stranded stuff i tried before just kind of stretched out on me over time. anyway your swr sounds totally reasonable for a first build honestly, mine was way worse first time up.

one thing i noticed with my inverted-v is that the height of the apex makes a bigger difference than i expected, raising mine from 20 to 30 feet cleaned up the pattern noticeably and the swr actually shifted a bit too so keep that in mind if you ever get a taller support. and yeah just do the coax choke for now, i wound mine on a old plastic pill bottle and its been up for a year with no issues.