Imagine you are with a friend on the beach., side by side on the water and a big wave comes. Do you fell less pressure because your friends is by your side?
Ham radio operator here: basically neither will happen because both don’t really mean anything.
This is an imperfect analogy, but I think it will set you thinking in the right direction: If someone is blinking a flashlight at you, and you’re sitting right next to another person, do both of you see the flashlight at 100% brightness, or do your eyes wrestle for the same light waves?
What does “pick up the signal at 100%” mean? Let’s say me and my buddy are talking on our car radios, no repeaters just point-to-point. If we start off in the same parking lot, we can easily hear each other. If we start driving in opposite directions, we’ll still hear each other just fine, until one of two things happens: We go on either side of a hill or far enough to be beyond the horizon, and then abruptly stop hearing each other, or the signal will fade in intensity until the background noise is louder.
If we get to that point where the signal is weak but still receivable, increasing output power of the transmitter, or switching to a directional antenna might help. People tend to think antenna gain is some magic that makes the radio louder, but it’s not. A high gain antenna does the same thing that cupping your hand behind your ear or around your mouth does; it puts more of the energy that would have gone in different directions in the direction you need.
Without getting too far into antenna theory, I will say that yes having two antennas near each other can cause them to interfere with each other. “Wrestle for the same radio waves” isn’t the way I would describe it. Antennas resonate with radio waves, it’s like a tuning fork, if you play the note the tuning fork is tuned to, the tuning fork will start to vibrate and emit its own sound. If two antennas are quite close together, this can cause destructive interference. You can use the same principle to construct a high gain antenna; look up how yagi antennas work for more details.
If you don’t mind a followup question, what’s happening when a signal clears up if you touch or just hover near an antenna?
That can be for a few reasons…
In some cases you’re tuning (or detuning) the antenna capacitively.
On other cases, like if your tv gets interference when you’re standing in part the room, there may be standing waves causing interference, as the rf is bouncing around your room.
To further your point, theorically, there is a voltage potential between any two objects. That’s the capacitance. Better conductor, for the same surface area, create a bigger potential.
So when you tune/detune a signal with your presence near the antenna, it is because you are close enough to the antenna that the potential between you and the antenna affects the filter of the signal.
How side-by-side are we talking? If the antennas are closer than their size, yeah, it won’t necessarily work the same way because they’ll act like one antenna. If they’re too far apart for “near field” effects (or if your antenna was tiny relative to the wave to start with, like with AM radio) it won’t matter, because the wave in question will just kind of ooze around any obstruction, and received power will just go with inverse square of distance to source again.
In practice, it’s unlikely to matter so much how loud the signal is, because (unless you’re using a crystal radio) you are definitely going to amplify it quite a lot before it’s useful, anyway. More of concern is how loud it is relative to any random noise that’s present, which is not so dependent on antenna area.
Edit: I suppose if it’s between you and the source, it will dim the signal a tiny, tiny little bit. Not the way a bigger thing can cast a shadow, though; think more like a slightly dirty lens.
Radios receiving signals don’t just siphon the signal off lol
What you’re asking would only really happen with wireless Internet service and it’s not because of the wireless signal, but because the overall bandwidth diminishes the more people connect to it.
I mean, literally there has to be at least a tiny amount of energy transference right?
It’s like solar energy. You either absorb it with a panel, or it goes to “waste”. You’re not really stealing it from someone else, as long as you’re not getting too much in the way
Usong your analogy i think Ops question was really if you have a stack of transparent solar panels will the panel below get less power and the answer is of course it will. If one antenna is behind another there will be a small reduction in the power of the signal reaching it, probably very small but with enough of them you could theoretically construct a faraday cage of sorts.
Actually, the waves emitted by the radio tower are enough for a receiving device to generate a small electrical current just through the oscillations of the propagating signal.
Depends. If the antennas were resonant dipoles placed some fraction of a wavelength away from each other (1/4 wave away), you may get some cancellation of the signal.
Look up the “yagi uda” antenna, it’s the classic rooftop tv antenna. The elements are spaced by fractions of a wavelength to achieve directivity. One single element is driven, the others are just resonant lengths of wire.
