Roy Lewallen wrote in message ...

I've tried to point out on this thread that although the feedpoint
impedance is an impedance with the units of ohms, and the impedance of a
plane wave in free space also has the units of ohms, they're not the
same thing. Feedpoint impedance is the ratio of a current to a voltage.
Wave impedance, or the intrinsic impedance of a medium, is the ratio of
an E field to an H field -- it's also the square root of the ratio of
the medium's permeability to its permittivity. An antenna converts
currents and voltages to E and H fields, it doesn't just transform one
impedance to another. Hence my insistence on calling an antenna a
transducer rather than a transformer.


I've agreed with you on the semantics of antennas as transducers,
but two transducers DO make a transformer.

Ohms are still always Ohms, regardless of what you are measuring.
And it's very interesting that the E and H fields have units of
Volts/meter and Ampere(turn)/meter, which when you divide one by the
other, you get basically Volts/ampere, just like you would in a
transmission line.

But I don't claim that a wave traveling in a transmission line is
the same as a wave traveling through free space.


Slick