For what it's worth --

I've avoided this discussion for two primary reasons. One is that it
saddens me to see this "controversial" topic being brought up yet again
after having been discussed at great length a number of times before.
There's no reason I can see for it other than Cecil's religious zeal and
dogged determination.

The second reason is that I hate to be reminded how easily some people
can be manipulated to wholly ignore well known physics and embrace
alternate theories which are devoid of the ability to produce
predictions or numerical results to demonstrate their validity. We live
with it every day in our ordinary lives, seeing the astrology column in
the newspaper (and learning that it's been a driving force behind top
level government decisions), homeopathic remedies at the drug store, and
so forth. It's hard to see it keep surfacing here also.

Fortunately, some very good, honest, and knowledgeable people have been
doing a very good job of presenting the facts. These include Tom, W8JI;
Ian, G3SEK; Wes Stewart, N7WS; and Gene Fuller, W4SZ. Anyone who is
truly interested in understanding the topic (which is fundamentally very
simple) would do well to read what those folks have written and are
writing. Because they're dealing with facts and well known phenomena,
they can back up what they say with numbers and the ability to explain
the phenomena you see.

I'd like to add one note to particularly pay attention to Ian's postings
on March 6 and 8 explaining the difference between an inductor and
inductance. When I and others have spoken of a "physically small coil"
we're talking about something resembling a pure inductance. As Ian and
others have said, the first step in understanding this topic is to
understand how the idealized component works. Only after that can you
add the effects of coupling to external fields, which explain the
current difference you typically do see between the ends of a real
inductor loading an antenna. The red herring in this discussion is the
attempt to attribute this effect to something fundamental about
inductances, rather than the effect of external fields interacting with
a real inductor of significant physical size. Part of this is
understandable, because an inductor can be surprisingly small and still
exhibit substantial current difference from one end to the other when in
the field of a short antenna, because the field from the antenna is very
intense. The field from the inductor is also quite large, making
noticeable capacitive coupling nearly always present, which also
provides a path for displacement current. So it's somewhat natural to
assume that the current difference between ends is more fundamental than
it really is. But the argument has been taken well beyond reason by the
zeal to explain every phenomenon by means of reflecting waves and
packets of average power. It's not necessary at all, and all that does
is to provide a confounding factor to obscure the simplicity of what's
really happening. Since the basis for this approach is largely contrived
and devoid of the ability to produce quantitative results, it's easy to
make pronouncements which can't be verified.

It's pretty obvious that objects in motion come to rest naturally
without any external force. You reach this conclusion by failing to
separate the external force of friction from the inherent inertia of the
object. The problem here is exactly the same -- people are failing to
separate the phenomenon of external coupling from the inherent
properties of inductance, and concluding that observed current
differences between the ends of loading inductors are caused by some
inherent property of inductance.

I can imagine people arguing about the basic property of objects to
spontaneously come to rest long after Newton proved it otherwise.
Actually, I wouldn't even be surprised if there's some Newtonian Cecil
who's still arguing about it.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL