Dave wrote:
thats the basic problem in this whole discussion. you are all talking
about
the same thing, just using different notation and incomplete statements
so
that none of you understands exactly what the others are trying to talk
about... when really you are all saying the same thing. its kind of like
after i graduated from college with an ee degree and my sister graduated
from an air force basic electronics course, she tried to ask me something
about currents in a transistor and i saw it all backwards... well of
course
she was talking electron flow and i was talking hole flow. we both got
the
same result but the notation was all different.

That's not true at all Dave. Most of us know that current is current.
It really only flows one direction at any instant of time. We can
indeed consider systems as having current that flows two directions at
one instant of time, but the results of that better agree with the
actual real current that flows only in one direction at any instant of
time or they are wrong.

Also, behavior of basic components cannot change. A two terminal device
like a loading coil cannot have differences in the current flowing
through it at each terminal without a third path. (I assume we all
know current is not an across vector and it does not "drop", the person
who started this thread just used poor wording.)

ARGH! maybe it really is more basic than different notations and
terminology. when working with antennas and 'component's that are a
significant fraction of a wavelength in size you must take into account the
'third path'... the 'third path' consists of the distributed capacitance and
resistance that CAN be modeled with lumped components if you want to go
through all the approximations and extra calculations that are required. if
you are ignoring that 'path' when talking about relatively large loading
coils then you will be wrong, how wrong depends on how large of course.

i haven't been following all the different threads and junk in here, but if
you are trying to analyze a significant sized loading coil without taking
into account all the paths then you are going to likely be less accurate
than cecil using a more complete distributed model. OBVIOUSLY if you are
using a strict lumped model the current can't be different from one end to
the other. And just as obviously if you make a really large loading coil,
like a full '1/2 wave' slinky dipole, the current at the feedpoint end will
be MUCH different than at the open end. You can both get the same results,
but to do it with lumped elements requires the same calculations that are
done by finite element simulations that try to do enough small lumped
elements as possible to approximate the distributed equations that would
give nice smooth results. Unfortunately cecil does not do a good job in
relating the distributed model, and his constant references to 'optics' and
the use of terms related to that field do nothing but confuse many of the
people in here to think that he is in a different world. admit it cecil,
while you may be correct, using a different set of terminology than most of
the people in here has done nothing but add to the confusion factor in many
of this long drawn out threads.

I still think that if each of you explained the WHOLE problem in your own
terminology, INCLUDING all the assumptions that are required for the models
you are using, that you would find that each of you is correct. but because
you are starting from different sets of assumptions you will never find a
common ground.

enough of this, back to assembling my new linear loaded 40m beam... why
don't you go analyze that loading system for a while.