R Stiffler wrote:
I guess his mail is getting messed up, the comments you make reference to were by Paul Lowrance and not myself.
My mistake - sorry about that. Your formatting (without caretted indenting) together with my sloppy editing was the cause. Paul wrote:
... Radiation resistance generates no thermal noise.
That may be true but the argument would be entirely semantic. The exact same process of "fluctuation-dissipation" occurs and once some thermal power has been dissipated by an antenna, then noise with thermal characteristics comes back in via your antenna and looks identical to a warm resistor generating Johnson noise. One might likewise argue that a resistor itself generates no thermal noise (since in a zero degree K thermal bath it certainly doesn't) and blame the effect on something going on in the resistor with another name - eg brownian motion of the electrons or something - but again that would just be semantics. The fact remains that whatever mechanism is available to _dissipate_ electrical power into the radiation resistance of the aether, must also act in reverse to produce electrical _fluctuations_ from the energy previously or similarly dissipated (hence the "_dissipation-fluctuation_ theorem"). Once equilibrium with the surroundings is reached, the power flowing from a warm resistor to a warm environment via an antenna will be exactly equal to the power flowing back from the warm environment to the warm resistor. In order to have no thermal noise being sourced into a circuit from an antenna, one would have to locate it so that its entire visible environment was at absolute zero (which is very similar to what is required for a resistor to generate no thermal noise).
... the antenna connected to a carbon resistor does indeed radiate more power than an antenna connected to a metal film resistor.
Only if you provide power in the form of a current through the carbon resistor to get the flicker mechanism oscillating (see the wikipedia flicker noise reference I offered previously). But then a powered integrated RF oscillator connected to an antenna will radiate even more power than a powered carbon resistor!
