christofire wrote:

* Would you care to cite a reference where it is stated that EM waves in the
far field of a transmitting antenna contain a significant longitudinal
component? Many respected authors, such as Kraus, have illustrated the
contrary, but their work isn't limited to paper; people like Kraus have
designed real antennas of types that are still in use today.
. . .

EM waves in an unbounded medium, far enough from a source to be in the
far field, have a longitudinal component only if the medium has loss. In
air, the fields are for all practical purposes purely transverse as
christofire says. Hence the descriptive name for the field orientation
as TEM for Transverse Electro-Magnetic. This is also true of some
bounded media such as coaxial cables, where again the fields are
transverse except for a usually small longitudinal component caused by
loss. But in other bounded media such as waveguides, one field or the
other (electric field in TM mode and magnetic in TE mode) can be
longitudinal. You'll also see a longitudinal component when a wave gets
close to lossy ground, although it's typically not large compared to the
total field.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL