Roger Halstead wrote in message . ..
....
Ahhh...with the impedance variation I beg to differ.
Otherwise how could I draw a 3 or 4 inch arc off the end of a 160
meter dipole.

You're welcome to differ, but indeed you may not be differing at all.
I did NOT say there was a low electrical field strength near the
antenna. Rather, the field _must_be_ essentially perpendicular to the
conductor, at the conductor's surface. So the potential between the
antenna and a point a short distance away, along a line parallel to
the electric field (that is, perpendicular to the antenna wire) may be
quite high. If the electric field exceeds the breakdown voltage of
air, you'll get corona. But if you see corona streamers, are they
_parallel_to_ the antenna wire? I doubt it...they will almost
certainly be perpendicular to the wire, where they meet the wire's
surface.

As I've suggested in other posts in this thread, I'll be happy to
listen to explanations about fields around an antenna, but if you're
going to talk about voltages between two points, be sure you specify
the path along which you will measure those voltages. If you tell me
there is a large voltage along a good conductor, then I know there is
a very large heat dissipation in that wire. But if your meter and its
leads have enclosed an area outside the wire, you have not measured
the voltage along the wire, but rather around the loop composed of the
wire and the meter's leads.

Cheers,
Tom