When I ask a question like this I would like to get a YES, and the way you make one is like this out of that. If you want to ad a lot of theory, fine but give me the short version first.
Some things
do have simple answers. Take pretty much anything about a half-wave dipole:
Q: What kind of wire or tubing should I use for best performance?
A: Doesn't matter one bit. Put up something that stays up in your weather.
Q: What kind of insulators should I use?
A: Doesn't matter much. PVC, polyethylene cutting board, varnished wood, glazed ceramic. Just don't use anything that absorbs water or conducts electricity.
Q: How should I connect the coax?
A: Doesn't matter. Solder, wire nuts, PL-259/SO-239. Just needs to be reasonably strain relieved and not constantly drip water onto your coax.
Q: How high does the dipole need to be? How far away from other objects/metal?
A: It doesn't matter. Higher and in the clear is better, but a dipole is a good antenna even if it has to be low and cluttered.
Q: My SWR is too high, what should I do?
A: If the SWR is lower at the bottom of the band, trim off some length. If the SWR is lower at the top end of the band, add some length. If you can't get low SWR at all, your dipole is broken and you should look for bad connections.
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For a basic dipole, EVERYTHING is simple.
Some things
do not have simple answers no matter how much you want there to be a simple answer. Baluns are one of those things, at least if you want it to actually make a difference and you don't just want to pretend the balun is doing something. Core type and size number of turns, coax or twisted pair and the insulation type... it often all matters.
And you can't just give advice willy-nilly and expect it to work. A balun that works great and totally fixed someone's RF feedback problem on a 75m half wave center-fed dipole used at full legal limit SSB with a non-worst-case feedline length for common mode might burn and crack in five minutes of 1kW 80m RTTY operation on a 60 foot high OCF dipole.
Can I use an air core balun? It depends. Can I use this ferrite I found in my junk box? It depends. Do I
need a balun? It depends. What core material? It depends.
Commercial companies will happily sell you a
vastly overbuilt balun with high common mode impedance and high power handling for a hundred bucks, and for people with plenty of funds or something like a single ladder-line-fed antenna, that can sometimes be a good solution to all the complexity. But for most applications they probably cost ten times more and weigh ten times much as is necessary. If you have a couple beams and four dipoles then the cost starts getting really ugly.
This is when I decided to get my own computer education and minimize the need to ask someone else.
It's a good idea. And even when you do ask others, a "trust but verify" attitude really pays off.
