Hi John,Nicely put! It certainly agrees with my (physics) education. I'm familiar with the W8JI pages, and used resources here to learn a lot of useful pointers in the use of isolation transformers in receive aerial circuits.
Back to "physically small" antennas. This is a term that I like, and one that seems to have pretty universal acceptance in meaning <0.1 wavelengths. Active circuits, high Q factors, coupling loops and other techniques are simply means of dealing with the curious and often extreme impedance characteristics they exhibit. I've tinkered with small loops, and find them rather fun. A few years ago, I ran some 22m beacon receive tests with a ramshackle 3ft (per side, 12 ga wire) square resonant loop. Despite casual placement, it showed useful performance. It's something I should repeat now conditions are better -at least with 22m, there's no need to retune it! I also used it to transmit PVC while monitoring from a 1-2 mile distance. It definitely "got out", radiation pattern notwithstanding. More quantitative methods to compare to the regular dipole were not explored.
There is a lot of confusion about electromagnetic response, and the sensitivity to simple magnetic and electric fields, as you point out. This perhaps culminated in the fallacy of the "Crossed Field" antenna which attempted to synthesize EM waves by superimposing electric and magnetic fields. Only accelerating charges radiate EM waves
Anyway, excellent discussion - Thank you!
73
Ed