Blacklane wrote:
I'm an electrical engineer with a Master's degree in Electromagnetics and antenna design. You need to understand that, for an alternating current system, a magnetic field and electric field coexist and are perpendicular to each other. They are not separable and you can't analyze one without the other.
For a transmission line, electric current flows through a wire, which creates a magnetic field around the wire, so the magnetic field is perpendicular to the wire. Imagine your right hand with your thumb in the direction of the current flow, then your curled fingers are the direction of the magnetic field. This magnetic field creates an electric field parallel to the wire, but in the opposite direction. When the current reverses (since this is AC) the magnetic field collapses and reverses. This creates a new electric field in the opposite direction. If we had another wire nearby, the new electric field would cause current to flow in that wire and we would call it a transformer.
At higher frequencies, we can stand miles away, hold up an piece of wire, and the electromagnetic field from a radio tower will make current flow in our wire in exactly the same way, only this time it will match the current that was flowing in the transmitter antenna. We would call that a radio receiver.
It's also important to know that in power distribution systems, we try to keep the wires close together so the electromagnetic fields cancel out. Take a simple lamp cord. Note that "circuit" means "circle", so there has to be the exact same current in both wires going in opposite directions. The net result is zero electromagnetic radiation, since the two wires cancel each other. The same is true for transmission lines, but on a larger scale. If you can be equi-distant from all of the lines, then the electromagnetic radiation is zero. A distance of a few hundred yards from most transmission lines effectively cancels out any effects to be minimal.
I removed my post because I may have the facts a bit off. Wife worked for Ma Bell for 40.5 years.
My post were about ghost cables? Cables not connected at one end at least and loops of bare wire on telephone polls.
They carried working phone circuits, even though the cable was not connected but perhaps at the end where the box was.
The loops of wire carrying circuits got my attention. There were other phone wires and repeaters, every so often on the other actual lines of course.
