Improving 40 m performance of my EFHW Antenna

Performance of the EFHW which I had installed recently was suboptimal on 40 m, though it was good on 20 m and 10 m. After getting a lot of advice from fellow hams both on air and online, I made some modifications in the layout of the EFHW. First I removed the counterpoise wire which had been connected to the ground outside my shack. Secondly I lowered the position of the balun to about 10 feet from the ground and anchored it to my compound wall fence with a nylon rope of about 2 m length so that it was away from the iron frame of the compound fence. Lowering of the balun gave me option of removing most of the zig-zag orientation of the antenna wire. Now it is almost an asymmetric inverted V configuration, mounted on a 16 feet non conducting pole fixed to my balcony with total height from ground of about 26 feet.

VSWR spread on 40 m band came down from 2.6-1.9 to 2.25-1.4. On 20 m, the VSWR spread moved slightly upward from 1.5-1 to 1.6-1 from lower end to upper end of the band. On 15 m band it was better, with spread coming down from 2.3-1.7 to 2.0-1.7. On 10 m band, it was better from 1.8 to 1.4. There is only minimal spread of VSWR across the 10 m band, compared to other bands. All these VSWR values are tunable with the built-in automatic antenna tuner of my radio to get final VSWR of almost 1:1 for the radio. On air performance was better on 40 m compared to previous configuration which I had posted yesterday. Even after 30 minutes of working on air, the radio did not hang.

But performance was not at par with my previous 40 m modified inverted V half-wave dipole antenna, which was about 1 m higher and with a galvanized iron pipe as mast. I could not raise the EFHW antenna to 24 feet as I had planned earlier, because I could not find the mechanism in the telescopic pole to raise it beyond 16 feet. I am wondering whether the one which I had purchased is a 16 feet version. I am still having a coil of HLF 200 cable tied to the mast, which I presume will act like a common mode choke, though I have not calculated the inductance value. Coil has been made just beyond the first 10 m of cable where there is a joint with SO 239 barrel connector.