recycling the metal supports from inside the rubber part of car windscreen wipers

I recently replaced the wiper on my car (see my cars channel on YouTube), inside the old blade was two strips of metal, I disassembled the spent wiper blade and pulled out the two pieces of metal, and thought that perhaps these could be made into a 2-meter dipole (though they may need to be trimmed to bring them resonant at 2-meters), and as a dipole it would need a choke, so I have used the same method I used for my copper wire dipole, the centre of a small reel with a few turns of RG58 on it cable tied in place.

I plan to connect it all up using terminal blocks I do not believe this metal will take solder well, it appears to be steel as well so may not be a brilliant antenna but this hobby is about experiments, the input will be fed through a chassis mount SO239, straight into the choke, with the antenna straight out of the choke.

I do not yet have a 3D printer so cannot print out a custom dipole centre for this project (that is something I am looking to do later), in the mean time my plan is to find something suitable to mount the SO239 into (it's one I pulled from a dead CB SWR meter), solder the shortest run possible of the output of the choke to it (the braid may well require a terminal lug around the screw holding the SO239 in place), with the antenna elements connected with the choke immediately after it (I found leaving even a short tail from the choke to the antenna itself created a high SWR last time I did that).

Testing will be done at a local high point, the antenna will be connected to a radio not too prone to pager interference (automatically ruling out the Leixen VV-898) fed with RG213 for the most part to keep the losses down and ensure as much power makes it to the antenna during these tests as this should then be possible, tuning will be done at the same time, though this is weather dependent.

will be interesting to to see how two flat strips of metal perform as an antenna, I might film this and put it onto YouTube on the day, SWR meter on the day will be the cross-needle one as this is the only one suited to use on 2-meters that I have, see how many QSOs I can get, preferably simplex, and if this antenna works well I may just use it as my go-to portable ops antenna for 2-meters FM, keeping the other dipole for temporary fixed use and the National Hamfest (and camp sites in general), I'll try and modify it so it fits the same Flo-Plast overflow pipe that the current one fits onto as that is cheaply available, once I know it works.

73 de 2E0EIJ