On the power absorbed by an electric dipole just above a conducting half space

It seems amazing that, after all these years, questions about power efficiency of dipole antennas near the ground are still being raised. In two remarkable memoirs, in 1909 and 1926, Sommerfeld presented formal exact solutions for the fields of Hertzian dipoles in the vicinity of a conducting half space. Banos (1966), in his highly cited monograph, covers the subject in an exhaustive fashion and puts Sommerfeld's seminal contributions in perspective. The related question of power absorbed in the lossy half space was presented by Sommerfeld and Renner in 1942 in an extensive treatment Nevertheless, some basic issues have not been resolved. It became apparent that the more-or-less conventional power loss calculations appeared to omit what was later coined as "E-field loss". The latter was associated with the vertical component of the current from the air into the lower conducting half space. The author focuses his attention on the subject by returning to the basic electric dipole over the half space model.