"Cecil Moore" wrote in message
...
Gene Fuller wrote:
In a lot of ways, standing waves and traveling
waves are opposites.

'standing' waves aren't waves at all, they are figments of your
instrumentation. simple instrumentation (read light bulb and loop of wire)
that was originally used to 'tune' antennas could detect only the peaks and
dips of the superimposed forward and reflected currents... because these
'looked' like waves that stood still on the line when you plotted them they
became known as 'standing' waves. and this also led to the horrible use of
the 'standing wave ratio' as a measure of how good an antenna was matched to
the feed line. all of this over the years has led hams to consider
'standing' waves as a real thing when it is really just a consequence of the
superposition principle. We would all be much better off if someone many
years ago had labeled the first 'SWR' meter in units of db for measuring
return loss, or v-forward/v-reverse, or some other real physical unit. not
that the meter would function any differently, but we would all be better
off understanding what is really being measured!