Picked up a couple of hamsticks recently, but just could not tune them. I put a meter on them and no electrical connection from one end to the other. I decided to take part of the heat shrink covering off at each end and this is what I found.
It turns out they were badly corroded (both ends of each pair of the dipole.
So the project is now to rebuild them from scratch and see if I can resurrect them.
Mike VA3MCT