Forgotten car accessories - the antenna

Many of you will still remember the times when, after buying a car, you went to a car supplies store and you bought an antenna to mount on your car. For this you had to drill a hole into the body and fix the antenna to the car. That was in the sixties and seventies. Many of these mostly manual telescopic antennas were later replaced by automatic telescopic antenna, offering the comfort of automatic activation when you turned on the radio. In the 80ies we started to install GSM phones of the first generations into our cars and an additional antenna was needed. With every new GSM generation typically also a new antenna was needed. In the nineties then and later the different antennas were consolidated and today they usually come with the car as standard equipment. At least me, I haven't installed an antenna lately. And nobody uses telescopic antennas anymore for new cars. Today they look like shark fins or are integrated into the wind screen of the car.
However, old cars still do have these funny antennas and if it's a manual one that needs a key to get it up then hopefully you received the key when you bought the car. The good thing about these old antennas is that they almost last forever, or at least as long as the car.