Backstay Antenna

[Brion Toss]

My only hope is that this is the pupal stage of some odd insect, and not the work of someone who is supposed to know how to do this kind of thing.
No? Well then what we have is a great deal of tape over a very limited amount of surface area, with maximal long-term opportunities for corrosion on both the backstay and the antenna wire.
If I were me, I'd confer with my favorite electrician on how to limit wire corrosion without interfering with signal quality. Then I'd treat the backstay accordingly, expose a healthy chunk of antenna wire, and seize it onto the backstay with several or many turns of annealed seizing wire. This would assure lots of contact surface without imposing backstay-strand-crushing loads or snag-prone bumps. Then I would apply a minimal amount of tape, with the idea being to keep the exposed antenna wire from corroding while covering little enough backstay that there's a chance that water and salt might evaporated/washed away readily.
In short, I'd try to accommodate the needs of both the backstay and the antenna.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss

PS,
Even if the setup in the photo made any sense, I'd still be inclined to discard it because it is ugly.