Antenna design is a dark art, I like simple hacks like this.

> The two parts of the antenna are intentionally designed to create an omnidirectional radiation pattern without a pronounced directionality.

I worked on a project a while back to try to utilize this to detect the arrival direction of WiFi signals approximately based on received strength. Do this for enough base stations and you have a very crude positioning system.

Silver-coated wire? I don't have that lying around.