I'm curious to know how power dissipated in radio waves is calculated. I still don't quite understand the concepts of VSWR and antennas, but I honestly can't visualize how, or rather what, RF power is?
VSWR is a measure of the effectiveness of impedance match between the transmission line and antenna. A good match is like a hallway with completely smooth walls out through the exit. You have all power transfer possible. As your impedance match gets worse, it is like putting a wall at the end with a door that is not the full size of the hallway and instructing those that hit the wall to turn around and walk against the people trying to get out. In addition to lost power, it can cause some issues with signal reflections, etc.
I'll skip explaining EM waves, as I'm sure someone else could do it better (my best explanation that I could come up with just ended up being confusing), but as for (V)SWR, impedance, reflection and whatnot, watch this video. It really is excellent.
My confusion about EM radiation has never been (so much) about the wave nature, but about how an antenna couples to the environment to actually radiate energy. Does anyone have a good reference that explains the physics involved and how it relates to Ohm and Kirchhoff etc?
A simple thought experiment could provide an analogy. Imagine water in a long closed pipe with a piston at the end, and imagine this piston is connected to a paddle on the surface of a lake. If you move the water back and forth in the pipe in an oscillating manner the piston at the end will move back and forth with the water pressure, which will move the paddle in the lake. The paddle moving in the lake will generate waves in the water that will radiate outwards and carry energy away. No water is actually flowing in this example, neither flowing out of the pipe, nor flowing away from the paddle (waves move through water, but the water stays where it is).
It's MAGIC. If you can explain what a magnetic field is, and what and electric field is, and what an electron is, then you can intuitively understand this. Heck they can't explain the speed of light, or gravity, or why the traveling of these photons of electromagnetic traveling waves are perpetual motion machines. As well all matter that has propagated through space for the last 13+ billion years.
We use Maxwell's equations, Faraday's laws, etc. It just works. Heck one of the posters here has Fourier's transform as his user name, can he see the convolution integral that maps frequency domain to time and back again? I can't, but Laplace and Fourier could.
If anyone can provide an intuitive explanation, I'm all ears.
A simple thought experiment could provide an analogy. Imagine water in a long closed pipe with a piston at the end, and imagine this piston is connected to a paddle on the surface of a lake. If you move the water back and forth in the pipe in an oscillating manner the piston at the end will move back and forth with the water pressure, which will move the paddle in the lake. The paddle moving in the lake will generate waves in the water that will radiate outwards and carry energy away. No water is actually flowing in this example, neither flowing out of the pipe, nor flowing away from the paddle (waves move through water, but the water stays where it is).
Great big to you. That's a good one. Do you teach?
A simple thought experiment could provide an analogy. Imagine water in a long closed pipe with a piston at the end, and imagine this piston is connected to a paddle on the surface of a lake. If you move the water back and forth in the pipe in an oscillating manner the piston at the end will move back and forth with the water pressure, which will move the paddle in the lake. The paddle moving in the lake will generate waves in the water that will radiate outwards and carry energy away. No water is actually flowing in this example, neither flowing out of the pipe, nor flowing away from the paddle (waves move through water, but the water stays where it is).
It's MAGIC. If you can explain what a magnetic field is, and what and electric field is, and what an electron is, then you can intuitively understand this. Heck they can't explain the speed of light, or gravity, or why the traveling of these photons of electromagnetic traveling waves are perpetual motion machines. As well all matter that has propagated through space for the last 13+ billion years.
We use Maxwell's equations, Faraday's laws, etc. It just works. Heck one of the posters here has Fourier's transform as his user name, can he see the convolution integral that maps frequency domain to time and back again? I can't, but Laplace and Fourier could.
If anyone can provide an intuitive explanation, I'm all ears.
Careful with "they". You'd be surprised how well some of this is understood by many people.
Then there are some nuts at CERN that think they observed exceeding the speed of light.