Is it possble to use an inductor with a stepdown transformer to generate power by using the power ouput of a ham radio through it's antenna? My friend states his antenna is a 40Watt'er. If I can, about how much power can i expect to gather using a n inductor.
Well, the transmitter may be 40 watts, but the antenna is usually not rated that way.
All of the radiated energy can theoretically be recovered from a transmitting antenna. The problem is how to capture it all. At a distance, the instrument used to capture radiated energy is another antenna, and tiny fractions of the radiated power can often be captured halfway around the globe.
A stepdown transformer will lower the voltage produced at the antenna, but that really has nothing to do with the amount of radiated energy you capture.
If you use a simple inductor as an antenna to capture radiated energy, you will find that it will probably not be possible to situate the inductor so as to capture very much, since the antenna may be radiating in many or even all directions! If the inductor gets too close to the antenna, it will affect the antenna's properties, and that further complicates the exercise.
Does any of that help?
Chuck
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Any large antenna can gather enough energy to run low-power circuits, if it is near powerful transmitters. Free-power radios used to be all the rage among hobbyists. A big wire antenna fed a rectifier circuit that produced enough snot to power a receiver and amplifier to drive a loudspeaker for modest audio levels. I built one and used it many years ago in Pittsburgh, PA. My home was close to several AM stations and my antenna was a wire about 60 feet long (along with a good ground).
Tesla had dreams about this scheme, by the way, and did produce some intriguing demonstrations.
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