Gene Fuller wrote:
Yes, most people with
rudimentary arithmetic skills would agree that 75 plus 8.33 does not
equal 133.33.

Too bad Dr. Best posted the equation: "Ptotal = 75w + 8.33w = 133.33w"
on this newsgroup (and, thank goodness, left it out of his article) so
he obviously disagreed with you at the time. He also said that interference
had nothing to do with it.

However, anyone even remotely familiar with waves would readily
understand that the component waves Cecil loves to talk about are merely
mathematical conveniences. It is entire possible to set up other model
configurations, such as a combination of a one traveling wave and one
standing wave.

What happens at an impedance discontinuity given those circumstances? To
find out, read my WorldRadio article, Part I of which is posted on my web
page. Part II will be posted after Christmas. At the risk of raising your
politically incorrect ire as I have done with this technical posting,
MERRY CHRISTMAS!.

In order to make his model work, Cecil needs to invoke the mythical P3
and P4 on the source side of the reflection discontinuity. He never gets
around to explaining how these two waves, which exactly cancel at all
points in space and at all times, can contain any energy at all.

The answer is simple. Do waves contain any energy at all? Do waves that
cancel contain any energy? If waves contain no energy, they cannot exist,
and therefore are incapable of canceling. If they exist and cancel, they
contained energy just before their cancellation. Any way you cut it,
my approach is consistent with the laws of physics as enumerated in "Optics",
by Hecht, and yours leads to a contradiction of those laws of physics.

The reason that most practitioners of wave models solve for the fields
first and then worry about power or energy is:

a - This procedure works correctly all the time.

Yes, it does. But optics engineers didn't have the luxury of dealing
with voltages and currents. They had to solve the problem using powers.
And they did exactly that decades ago. That RF engineers refuse to
consider the laws of physics concerning EM waves developed by optics
engineers is absolutely astounding to me. W7EL put it best, something
to the effect that if it wasn't invented here, we don't want to hear it
(even if it is right). But I daresay that Eugene Hecht knows much more
about EM waves that you will ever know, given your closed mind.

I do not expect to change Cecil's mind. Other than his own potential
embarrassment from the silly publications in World Radio, his folly is
harmless.

You are just displaying your extreme ignorance, Gene. My "WorldRadio" article
corrects some of the *conceptual* errors in Dr. Best's QEX article but otherwise
contains the same equations as his article. If you disagree with me, you are
also disagreeing with Dr. Best's equations, i.e. you are between a rock and a
hard place.

It is interesting that the very people who tell us not to worry about energy
are the people who get so emotionally rabid when someone chooses to worry about
energy like real-world physicists do. What do they possibly have to lose besides
face, self-esteem, sleep, and their pseudo-religious guru status? :-)
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp