do you have any more as to why?
There is no magic to antennas. It's well established science. If there was some way to make an antenna that would cover "27MHz to 1200MHz" effectively and stuff it in 12.5 inches of PVC pipe, we'd see police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, aircraft and the military all running around with pieces of 1/2" PVC pipe on their chosen mode of transportation.
But we don't. And for a good reason. There is no magic to antennas.
The magic exists in the PVC pipe, and its something that makes people think it's a wonderful antenna that is going to outperform everything else, then spend $50.00 on it.
You cannot make 12.5 inches of antenna behave properly at frequencies down to 25MHz. It will not happen. Will it receive something? Sure, if the signal is strong enough. But then again you can do the exact same thing with a paper clip. I'm happy to sell those for $50.00 each and include 50 feet of RG-59 with "twist on connectors"
12.5" is 1/4 wave at just above the 220MHz ham band. You can shrink a 1/4 wave antenna down a bit, but at 154MHz, a popular place for public safety users, it needs to be more like 18" long and with a good ground plane if you want it to work effectively.
It'll probably work half way decently above 220MHz, but it's not going to be a tuned antenna. Might work well in the UHF band, since that's approaching 1/2 wavelength, but the antenna won't have the matching network to create a good 50Ω match.
On the other hand, hobbyists have been using random lengths of wire for antennas for years. The rubber ducky antennas on portable scanners is often only tuned to one portion of the spectrum the radio covers. It's works OK, but searching this website will show you thousands of posts from people looking to upgrade the portable scanner antennas. Some base scanners come with a telescopic antenna. Most just pull them out all the way and assume that's best. Might be on certain frequencies, but it's going to be a random length of wire on all others. Again, search for posts on here about people looking for something better than the telescopic antenna on their scanner.
You can take a rubber ducky antenna, or a telescopic antenna, and stuff it in a PVC pipe. But that isn't going to make it work any better.
You could do some tuned length pieces of wire in the PVC pipe, and that might give some performance on more than one band, but again, no ground plane. And you are not going to get a tuned length of wire in there for the VHF band, and absolutely not for anything resembling 25MHz.
We have no idea what's stuffed inside that PVC pipe. But I can assure you it's not magic antenna dust. Like a lot of cheap PVC marine band antennas, it's a stripped back piece of coaxial cable, like was said above. Still too short to do much good.
You are certainly welcome to buy it and experience this for yourself.
If I had money burning a hole in my pocket, I'd love to start buying these "magic" antennas and put them on an analyzer to see how they perform. Then I'd like to take them apart and photograph what's inside. If I did that, I think a lot of these sellers would be mighty upset.