I like to build and test my own home grown antennas, starting with 2M J-Pole’s and up to an HF dipole wire antenna.
My best antenna has been a Tape Measure Antenna that I made out of an old broken 60″ piece of discarded tape measure.
The calculator says that I need a 20″ side and a 40″ side for a J-pole, so I bent that around the end of a 24″ long piece of PVC pipe. I scraped the paint off of the tape and used a couple of sheet metal screws to both attach wires to the antenna as well as secure the tape measure to the PVC.
The extra length of tape measure can be folded down and stuffed into the pvc for storage.
Using a NanoVNA-F, I found that I had to trim both ends of the tape to get the frequency up to the 2M band, so I am thinking that the velocity factor of the tape is less than that of a copper pipe.