[today’s run: 2.5 miles with wife and dog]
I seem to collect a lot of stuff. I picked up this old Barker and Williamson dipole center piece along the way.
It is made of metal with a whole passel of screws holding it together. RG-8 type coax comes in the bottom and connections are made internally to the two arms of the dipole. There is no balun as would be commonly used today. The white insulators are ceramic. Both sides have some cracking problems.
The two metal shell-halves are identical, half of the screws go in one side and half go in the other side. It looks like there was probably some stick-um helping to waterproof the thing, but that is all dried up.
Modern versions of this are made out of PVC-type material, lighter and cheaper.
I doubt I will ever use this. I have another one, a bit newer design with an internal balun that I think I’d try first.
I have had good success in the past feeding a doublet with open-wire feedline and using a parallel tuner. I like that because it doesn’t take so much brain power to figure out how to build it, and there is a lot less RF lost in the feedline.