  A plasma haloscope has recently been proposed as a feasible approach to
extend the search for dark matter axions above 10 GHz ($\sim$ 40 $\mu$eV),
whereby the microwave cavity in a conventional axion haloscope is supplanted by
a wire array metamaterial. As the plasma frequency of a metamaterial is
determined by its unit cell, and is thus a bulk property, a metamaterial
resonator of any frequency can be made arbitrarily large, in contrast to a
microwave cavity which incurs a steep penalty in volume with increasing
frequency. We have investigated the basic properties of wire array
metamaterials through $S_{21}$ measurements in the 10 GHz range. Excellent
agreement with theoretical models is found, by which we project achievable
quality factors to be of order $10^{4}$ in an actual axion search. Furthermore,
schemes for tuning the array over a usable dynamic range ($30\%$ in frequency)
appear practical from an engineering perspective.
