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Nice explanation! I wrote an article on a similar topic, and tells the story of Armstrong.

https://open.substack.com/pub/viksnewsletter/p/how-a-superheterodyne-transceiver?r=222kot&utm_medium=ios

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Shouldn't the animations show the half-plates at opposite polarity (or, better, a gradient, as in the drawn animation)? and striped wavefronts showing the polarity of the field? Then receiving antennas graphics could show the effect of either matched or mismatched antennas and impedances and whatnot

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Mar 26·edited Mar 26Author

The propagation animation represents electric field direction in a manner similar to how they're represented by arrows in the first illustration - i.e., as a region where a charged particle experiences a pull in one direction or another:

https://cdn.britannica.com/96/196-004-767CD0FE/field-lines-charges.jpg

Here's another variant of that antenna animation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Dipole_xmting_antenna_animation_4_408x318x150ms.gif

Basically, we're just drawing the lines more densely and using hues instead of tiny arrows.

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Right, would be nice to have the nicely rendered colourful animation better represent the reality, at least with the arc ends at opposite polarity. It is very misleading to show the wavefronts having uniform polarity, especially at ends of the arcs ("lie to children" paradigm?)

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