so i finally pulled the trigger and built my first homebrew dipole after years of just using a vertical i bought off the shelf. went with 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had lying around from an old project, cut each leg to about 33.5 feet which is what the formula spat out for 7.150 mhz center. fed it with some RG-8X i had leftover.

hoisted it up in kind of an inverted-V config because i only have one good tall tree in the yard, about 35 feet at the apex, legs drooping down to maybe 8 feet on each side tied off to some fence posts. got it tuned up pretty decent with my antenna analyzer, SWR is sitting around 1.3:1 at 7.150 which im pretty happy with honestly.

my question is more about the feedpoint - i just twisted the center conductor and shield to the wire ends and taped everything up with self-amalgamating tape. should i be using a balun here? ive read like 50 different opinions on this and cant figure out what the actual answer is. some guys say a 1:1 choke balun is basically mandatory, others say dont bother. my feedline runs along the ground back to the shack about 60 feet and the coax shield might be radiating but i honestly cant tell if thats a problem or not.

yeah the balun question is one of those things that never stops being argued about on forums lol. short answer is - for a dipole fed with coax, a 1:1 current balun (choke type, not a voltage balun) at the feedpoint is genuinely worth doing. what it actually prevents is RF from running back down the outside of the coax shield, which can cause all kinds of weird stuff like your radio getting warm to the touch, TVI complaints from neighbors, weird SWR readings that change when you touch the coax, that kind of thing.

the easiest homebrew choke balun is just winding 8-10 turns of your feedline coax into a coil about 6 inches diameter right at the feedpoint, zip tie it together and tape it up. costs nothing and it actually works pretty well for HF. some people use a snap-on ferrite or wind on a type 31 toroid which is better but for 40m and casual use the coil trick is fine to start with. your SWR at 1.3 sounds great for that antenna height by the way, inverted-V at 35 feet on 40 should work pretty well.

im in almost exactly the same situation, built a 20m dipole last month and had the coax running along the ground too. i noticed my SWR would shift a little bit if i moved the coax around which apparently is the sign that the shield is doing stuff it shouldnt be. wound a quick choke balun out of the coax itself like 8 turns around a piece of PVC pipe i had, problem basically went away. might be worth trying before you go buy anything