Neutral electronics are a farce...

Radio waves do not follow the inverse square law like magnetic fields. If they did we would be unable to talk to astronauts on the moon or to send transmissions out into the galaxy you know SETI and all that. Radio waves don’t attenuate in vacuum of space and the only reason they attenuate in free space of Earth’s atmosphere is because of losses due to absorption and scattering. The reason ELF works is actually because the transmit power is 1M watts and because the preamps on the receive side are extremely sensitive. But getting back to my real point for just a sec, shielding protects the conductor from external EMI/RFI but not from it’s own induced magnetic field. That’s why I said cables and power cords shoot themselves in the foot. End of argument.

^^ Do you really believe that?? Here’s another link from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation
-wherein we find this text, pretty much the same as they teach in school:

In free space, all electromagnetic waves (radio, light, X-rays, etc.) obey the inverse-square law which states that the power density of an electromagnetic wave is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance from a point source[5]

The math is shown on the Wiki page. If you click on the inverse-square law link above, you will see why this is so.

If what you are attempting to claim was actually true they would need repeaters every twenty feet as opposed to every 25 miles or whatever. When transmitting to a satellite at 23K miles there are no repeaters! Hel-loo!

Geoff, note the reference to a point source in the quote Ralph (Atmasphere) provided just above. The reason the amplitude of electromagnetic waves goes down in free space as distance increases is that they "spread out" to some degree. If they are emitted by a point source, and therefore are radiated essentially equally in all directions, the energy received at any given point will decrease in proportion to the square of the distance, since (as stated in the reference Ralph provided) "the surface area of a sphere increases with the square of the radius."

That is the same reason, btw, that the SPL produced by a relatively small box-type speaker (which from the perspective of a listener seated some distance in front of the speaker can be considered as roughly approximating a point source) drops off at 6 db per doubling of distance (putting aside the effects of room reflections). Planar speakers and line sources of course behave differently, and SPL falls off more slowly in those cases, as distance increases.

What makes communications with satellites and inter-planetary probes possible is that the antennas are designed to focus the RF energy much more sharply than a point source, so that the energy "spreads out" as little as possible as distance increases.

Consider the example of a flashlight being shined against a wall, in comparison to a laser pointer being shined against the wall. As distance increases, the diameter of the spot that is illuminated by the flashlight will INCREASE much more than in the case of the laser pointer. While the brightness of any given point within the spot that is illuminated by the flashlight will DECREASE much more, as distance increases, than in the case of the laser pointer.

Regards,
-- Al