so ive been putting off building my own dipole for like two years now, just running a vertical i bought off amazon that honestly never impressed me. finally sat down yesterday with some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage, cut it to length for 40m using the 468/f formula, and threw it up in an inverted V config between my chimney and a tree about 60 feet away. center is maybe 30 feet up give or take.

swr at resonance is sitting around 1.4:1 which i know is fine, the radio is happy and i dont have the tuner kicking in. but something just feels off, like the signal reports im getting on 40 are maybe slightly better than the vertical but not the huge jump i was expecting. worked a few stations in the midwest from the northeast and they were giving me 57-58 which is decent but i was hoping for more. maybe my expectations were just too high? or maybe 30 feet isnt really enough for a 40m dipole to shine. the legs are each around 33 feet and i oriented it more or less east-west which should favor north-south paths theoretically.

feedline is about 40 feet of rg8x going into the shack, no balun currently which i know some people will yell at me for. thinking about adding a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint but wanted to see how it performed first. anyone built similar setups and have thoughts on what to tweak first?

30 feet isnt bad for 40m but youre right that its not ideal, the antenna wants to be at least a half wavelength up for the takeoff angle to really work in your favor for dx. at 30 feet youre probably getting a fairly high angle of radiation which actually helps for regional stuff — like 300 to 800 mile paths — but kills you for dx or even long skip. if youre comparing to a vertical then the vertical has a lower takeoff angle naturally which is why some guys swear by them for 40m dx even though they have worse gain on paper.

definitely throw a choke balun on there though, the lack of one can cause all kinds of weirdness with common mode current on the coax shield and it might actually be affecting your pattern or causing rf in the shack. i wound mine on a piece of pvc with about 10 turns of the coax itself, works fine up through 20m, but for 40 a lot of people go with a ferrite choke. either way its worth doing before you start tweaking anything else because you dont really know what youre measuring until the feedline is decoupled properly.

yeah the inverted V shape also narrows the pattern a bit compared to a flat dipole and the lower leg angles reduce the effective height a little. i built a similar setup last spring and had the same 'meh' feeling at first. honestly it grew on me once i started using it more — wire antennas have this way of rewarding patience i think. also 1.4:1 is great, dont chase a lower number for the sake of it.