Light has no charge at all. It consists only of electric and magnetic field, each endlessly recreating the other as the pair zip off through empty space at the speed of light.

The fact that light waves can travel in vacuum, and don't need any material to carry them, was disturbing to the physicists who first studied light in detail. They expected to find a fluid-like aether, a substance that was the carrier of electromagnetic waves. Instead, they found that those waves travel through truly empty space. One thing led to another, and soon Einstein proposed that the speed of light was profoundly special and that space and time were interrelated by way of that speed of light.

I'm beginning to think that movies and television do a huge disservice to modern society by blurring the distinction between science and fiction. So much of what appears on the big and little screen is just fantasy.

The walls of your home are simply hard to look through. They block visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light nearly perfectly and that doesn't leave snoopers many good options. A person sitting outside your home with a thermal camera--a device that "sees" the infrared light associated with body-temperature objects--or a digital camera is going to have a nice view of your wall, not you inside. There are materials that, while opaque to visible light, are relatively transparent to infrared light, such as some plastics and fabrics. However, typical wall materials are too thick and too opaque for infrared light to penetrate. Sure, someone can put a camera inside your home and access it via an optical fiber or radio waves, but at that point, they might as well just peer through your window.

The only electromagnetic waves that penetrate walls well are radio waves, microwaves, and X rays. If someone builds an X ray machine around your home, they'll be able to see you, or at least your bones. Don't forget to wave. And, in principle, they could use the radar technique to look for you with microwaves, but you'd be a fuzzy blob at best and lost in the jumble of reflections from everything else in your home.

As for using a laser to monitor your conversations from afar, that's a real possibility. Surfaces vibrate in the presence of sound and it is possible to observe those vibrations via reflected light. But the technical work involved is substantial and it's probably easier to just put a bug inside the house or on its surface.

Since I first posted this answer, several people have pointed out to me that terahertz radiation also penetrates through some solid surfaces and could be used to see through the walls of homes. In fact, the whole low-frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, microwaves, terahertz waves) can penetrate through electrically insulating materials in order to "observe" conducting materials inside a home and the whole high-frequency end of that spectrum (X-rays and gamma rays) can penetrate through simple atoms (low atomic number) in order to "observe" complex atoms inside a home. Still, these approaches to seeing through walls require the viewers to send electromagnetic waves through the house and those waves can be detected by the people inside. They're also not trivial to implement. I suppose that people could use ambient electromagnetic waves to see what's happening in a house, but that's not easy, either. Where there's a will, there's a way: stealth aircraft have been detected by way of the dark spot they produce in the ambient radio spectrum and the insides of the pyramids have been studied by looking at cosmic rays passing through them. Nonetheless, I don't think that many of us need worry about being studied through the walls of our homes.

CB or citizens band radio refers to some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that have been set aside for public use. You can operate a CB radio without training and without serious legal constraints, although the power of your transmitted wave is strictly limited. The principal band for CB radio is around 27 MHz and I think that the transmissions use the AM audio encoding scheme. As you talk, the power of your transmission increases and decreases to represent the pressure fluctuations in your voice. The receiving CB radio detects the power fluctuations in the radio wave and moves its speaker accordingly.

While tracking a radio transmitter is easy--you only need to follow the radio waves back to their source--you might think that tracking a radio receiver is impossible. After all, a radio receiver appears to be a passive device that collects radio waves rather than emitting them. But that's not entirely true. Sophisticated radio receivers often use heterodyne techniques in which the signal from a local radio-frequency oscillator is mixed with the signal coming from the antenna. The mixing process subtracts one frequency from the other so that antenna signals from a particular radio station are shifted downward in frequency into the range the radio uses to create sound. This mixing process allows the radio receiver to be very selective about which station it receives. The receiver can easily distinguish the station that's nearest in frequency to its local oscillator from all the other stations, just as its easy to tell which note on a piano is closest in pitch to a particular tuning fork.

But heterodyne techniques have a side effect: they cause the radio receiver to emit radio waves. These waves originate with the local radio-frequency oscillator, and with other internal mixing frequencies such as the intermediate frequency oscillator present in many sophisticated receivers. Because these oscillators don't use very much power, the waves they emit aren't very strong. Nonetheless, they can be detected, particularly at short range. For example, it's possible for police to detect a radar detector that contains its own local microwave oscillator. Similarly, people who have tried to pirate microwave transmissions have been caught because of the microwaves emitted from their receivers. In WWII, the Japanese were apparently very successful at locating US forces by detecting the 455 kHz intermediate frequency oscillators in their radios--a problem that quickly led to a redesign of the radios to prevent that 455 kHz signal from leaking onto the antennas (thanks to Tom Skinner for pointing this out to me). As you can see, it is possible to track someone who is listening to the right type of radio receiver. However, the radio waves from that receiver are going to be very weak and you won't be able to follow them from a great distance.

Radio waves are a class of electromagnetic waves, specifically the lowest frequency, longest wavelength electromagnetic waves. Actually, the electromagnetic waves used in cellular & PCS transmissions are technically known as microwaves because they have wavelengths of less than 1 meter, but there are no important differences between radio waves and microwaves.

Like all electromagnetic waves, radio waves and microwaves consist of coupled electric and magnetic fields that sustain one another in stable structures that move rapidly through empty space. Because an electromagnetic wave's electric field changes with time, it is able to create the wave's magnetic field and, because its magnetic field changes with time, that magnetic field is able to create the wave's electric field. Since they consist only of electric and magnetic fields, these waves cannot stay still--they must move (although you can trap them between mirrors so that they appear to stand in one place as they bounce back and forth). While they contain no true mass, they do contain energy and an electromagnetic wave carries energy from one place to another.

Electromagnetic waves are created whenever electrically charged particles change speed or direction; whenever they accelerate. Since there are accelerating electric charges everywhere--thermal energy keeps them moving about--there are also electromagnetic waves everywhere. But the radio waves used in communications systems are generated deliberately by moving electric charges back and forth. When charges are sent up and down a radio antenna, these charges are accelerating and they form complicated electric and magnetic fields that include electromagnetic waves. Once launched, those electromagnetic waves propagate through space at approximately the speed of light.

To send information with radio waves, a transmitter makes modifications in one or more the wave's characteristics. In an amplitude modulation scheme (AM), the transmitter changes the strength or "amplitude" of the wave to convey information--like sending radio smoke signals. In the frequency modulation scheme (FM), the transmitter changes the frequency of the wave to convey information--like whistling a tune with a complicated melody.

I can't completely avoid electric and magnetic fields because polarization in optics is associated with a wave's electric field. I also can't depend entirely on water waves because they only have one (transverse) polarization. Still, I will try.

First, consider a wave traveling toward us on the surface of a lake. Suppose that this wave passes under a small boat and I ask you which way the wave is making the boat move. You would tell me that the boat is moving up and down. I would then tell you that the wave is vertically polarized because it causes objects that it encounters to move up and down rhythmically.

Unfortunately, pure water won't do for the next step because it won't support horizontally polarized waves. So let's imagine that some ecological disaster has turned the entire lake into gelatin. An explosion at the side of the lake now causes a wave to begin heading toward us on the gelatin lake, but this strange wave involves a side-to-side motion of the lake's surface. Now when the wave passes under the boat, the boat moves side-to-side rhythmically. In this case the wave is horizontally polarized because it causes objects that it encounters to move left and right rhythmically.

Now let's return to optics. When an electromagnetic wave heads toward us, its electric fields will push any electrically charged particles it encounters back and forth rhythmically. If we watch one of these charged particles as the wave passes it and observe that this particle moves up and down, then the wave is vertically polarized. If instead the charged particle moves left and right, then the wave is horizontally polarized.

That's a very open ended question so I'll describe the simplest AM radio I can think of--a crystal radio. A crystal radio already addresses most of the issues of AM radio and more sophisticated AM radios just improve on its performance.

You need only four basic components for a crystal radio: an antenna, a tank circuit, a diode, and a high-impedance earphone.

The antenna is a long wire that projects upward into the electromagnetic fields of the passing radio wave so that electric charges begin to move up and down its length. The ideal length for this wire is a quarter of the wavelength of the wave you're trying to receive, but since that's hundreds of meters for a typical AM station, you'll have to settle for a shorter than ideal antenna.

The tank circuit is a coil of wire that's connected at each end to the two ends of a capacitor. In a typical crystal radio, one of these items--either the coil or the capacitor--is adjustable and forms the tuning element that allows you to select a particular AM station. The tank circuit is a resonant device--electric charges and current flow back and forth through it rhythmically at a specific frequency. If that resonant frequency is adjusted so that it coincides with the transmission frequency of an AM radio station, the small currents flowing in the antenna that's connected to the tank circuit will excite large movements of charge and current in the tank circuit.

The diode is also connected to the tank circuit. Its job is to extract some of the charge that oscillates back and forth in the tank circuit and to send that charge to the earphone. By allowing current to flow only in one direction, the diode samples the overall amount of charge moving in the tank circuit. What it passes to the earphone is a measure of how strong the radio wave is, which is actually the form in which the AM radio station is transmitting sound information.

The high-impedance earphone uses the diode's tiny charge deliveries to reproduce sound. The diaphragm inside the earphone moves back and forth as the amount of charge passing through the diode fluctuates up and down. Each time the radio wave increases in strength, the diaphragm moves in one direction. Each time the radio wave decreases in strength, the diaphragm moves in the other direction. Thus as the radio station varies the strength of its radio wave, the earphone's diaphragm moves back and forth and it reproduces the sound.

A radio station launches a radio wave by moving electric charges rhythmically up and down their antenna. As this electric charge accelerates back and forth, it produces a changing electric field--a structure in space that pushes on electric charges--and a changing magnetic field--a structure in space that pushes on magnetic poles. Because the electric field changes with time, it creates the magnetic field and because the magnetic field changes with time, it creates the electric field. The two travel off across space as a pair, endlessly recreating one another in an electromagnetic wave that will continue to the ends of the universe. However, when this wave encounters the antenna of your radio, its electric field begins to push electric charges up and down on that antenna. Your radio senses this motion of electric charges and thus detects the passing radio wave.

To convey audio information (sound) to you radio, the radio station makes one of several changes to the radio wave it transmits. In the AM or Amplitude Modulation technique, it adjusts the amount of charge it moves up and down its antenna, and hence the strength of its radio wave, in order to signal which way to move the speaker of your radio. These movements of the speaker are what cause your radio to emit sound. In the FM or Frequency Modulation technique, the radio station adjusts the precise frequency at which it moves charge up and down its antenna. Your radio senses these slight changes in frequency and moves its speaker accordingly.

A vertical pole radio antenna receives a radio wave by allowing that wave to push electric charges up and down the antenna. The radio senses this moving charge and is thus aware of the passing radio wave. The ideal length of a vertical receiving antenna is a quarter of the wavelength of the radio wave it's trying to receive--in which case, charge that the radio wave's electric field pushes up and down the antenna has just enough time to reach the end of the antenna before it has to reverse directions.

The waves used for standard AM radio transmissions have very long wavelengths--typically 300 meters--so that they require vertical pole antennas that are about 75 meters long for optimal reception. An antenna of that length is also optimal for radio transmission, which is why the antennas of AM radio stations are so long and slender. However, because such long antennas are inconvenient for most AM receivers, most AM receivers use small magnetic antennas. A magnetic antenna is a device containing an iron-like material called ferrite that draws in magnetic flux lines like a sponge. A coil of wire is wound around this ferrite so that as the magnetic flux lines of a passing radio wave enter the ferrite, they induces electric currents into the coil of wire. This coil then acts as the antenna.

But the waves used in FM radio transmission have much shorter wavelengths--typically 3 meters--so that antennas of about 75 centimeters are all that's needed. The vertical pole radio antenna on your car is designed to receive these FM waves. The antennas of FM radio stations are also rather short, but they are usually mounted high up on a pole so that the whole structure looks like an AM radio antenna. However, if you look near the top of an FM radio tower, you'll see the actual FM antenna as a much smaller structure.

A radio wave contains an electric field that pushes on any electric charge it encounters. That's why, when a radio wave passes the antenna of your radio, it causes electric charges in that antenna to accelerate up and down. There is also a resonant circuit connected to the antenna--a circuit that oscillates strongly only when charge is pushed up and down the antenna at exactly the circuit's resonant frequency. If the circuit's resonant frequency is the same as that of the radio wave, the small pushes exerted on charges in the antenna add up so that charge moves more and more vigorously through the resonant circuit. But if your radio isn't tuned to the frequency of the radio wave, the overall motion of charge on the antenna and this resonant circuit is small. That's why your radio only responds to the radio transmission of one station and not others. To understand this effect, imagine pushing a child on a swing. If you push rhythmically at just the right frequency, the child will swing higher and higher. But if you push rhythmically at the wrong frequency, the child will just jitter about a bit.

Once charge is moving strongly through the resonant circuit in your radio, the radio can monitor various features of that moving charge. If the station is using the AM or amplitude modulation technique to represent sound, your radio studies the amount of charge moving back and forth through the resonant circuit. When that flow of charge--that current--is strong, it moves the speaker cone toward you and produces a compression of the air. When that current is weak, it moves the speaker cone away from you and produces a rarefaction of the air. These changes in air density and pressure reproduce the sound that the station is transmitting.

If the station is using the FM or frequency modulation technique to represent sound, your radio studies the frequency at which charge moves back and forth in the resonant circuit. Very small changes in this frequency, caused by frequency changes in the radio wave itself, are used to control the speaker cone in your radio. When the frequency is raised slightly above normal, your radio moves the speaker cone toward you and produces a compression of the air. When the frequency is lowered slightly below normal, your radio moves the speaker cone away from you and produces a rarefaction of the air. Again, these changes in air density and pressure produce sound.

These days, radios just look like electronic circuit boards inside. You'd have some trouble telling the difference between a radio and a computer. AM and FM are both techniques whereby the radio station tells your radio which way to move the diaphragm of its speaker and by how much, in order to make sound. In the AM or Amplitude Modulation technique, the station raises or lowers the power of its radio wave to tell your radio to move its speaker diaphragm toward you or away from you, respectively. The higher the power of the radio wave, the more your radio pushes its diaphragm toward you. In the FM or Frequency Modulation technique, the station raises or lowers the frequency of its radio wave slightly to tell your radio to move its speaker diaphragm toward you or away from you, respectively. The more it raises the frequency of its radio wave, the more your radio pushes its diaphragm toward you.

Yes, you can use a radio to communicate with your friends, but they will also have to have radios. Amateur radio has been popular almost since the invention of radio and the most accessible version of this hobby, citizen band or CB radio, was extremely popular in the 60's and 70's. You can still buy CB radios and communicate with friends directly through the air, but the general interest in CB radio has waned in recent years. Unfortunately, you can't make your friend's radio ring to alert them to begin listening. You'll have to anticipate your "call." Also, there is no privacy on conventional radio--any nearby person with a similar radio can listen in.

You can produce a broad range of infrared lights with a heat lamp. A heat lamp looks very dim because most of the thermal radiation it emits is in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just attach the heat lamp to a normal light dimmer and you'll be able to vary its infrared output over a wide range of intensities. Its frequency range will also shift farther away from the visible as you lower its temperature by turning down the dimmer. If it produces more visible light than you want, you can put a filter in front of it that absorbs visible light while permitting infrared light to pass. Such filters are certainly available from filter companies such as Hoya or Corning but cheaper versions (perhaps even plastic filters) may be found through scientific supply companies.

There are homing devices small enough to fit on bugs, so there should be no problem fitting one on or into a laptop. A homing device is simply a radio transmitter and, while it has recently become possible to build a homing device that actually knows where it is and can tell you via its transmission, the techniques involved in locating most normal homing devices are those of trying to find the source of a radio transmission. Using directional receiving antennas and studying the transmission from several locations, you can figure out where the transmission is coming from.

A crystal radio uses a crystal diode to detect tiny fluctuating currents in its antenna system. When a radio wave passes across an antenna, the wave's electric field pushes electric charges up and down the antenna. The crystal diode acts as a one-way gate that allows some of this moving charge to flow onto another wire and then prevents it from returning to the antenna. Since the charge can't return to the antenna, it flows elsewhere--passing through a sensitive earphone and creating sound. An AM radio station encodes sound as changes in the intensity (or amplitude) of the radio wave. As the radio wave's intensity fluctuates, the amount of electric charge flowing through the earpiece of the crystal radio also fluctuates and you hear sound.

The communication from the remote to the opener is done with radio waves. When you push the button on the remote, it produces a brief burst of radio waves at a specific frequency and with a selected pattern of pulses. A radio receiver in the opener is continuously looking for a transmission at that same frequency and with that same pattern of pulses. While other garage door openers may use radio waves of the same frequency, it's extremely unlikely that they will make use of the same pattern of pulses. This pattern of pulses is the security code that prevents unauthorized opening of your garage door. These security codes have grown longer and more sophisticated over the years. Early garage door openers had no security code at all and could be opened by almost any radio transmission at the right frequency. You could drive around neighborhoods with a remote and open garage doors right and left. But now the security codes are complicated enough that opening someone else's garage door is almost impossible.

Radio interference occurs whenever two nearby radio transmitters are simultaneously emitting radio waves that overlap in space and frequency. The receivers for these two waves can't tell them apart and end up receiving both at once. This interference is familiar with AM radio, where you can sometime hear two broadcasts at the same time. With FM radio, the receivers are clever enough to distinguish one radio wave from another, but they can't determine which broadcast they're supposed to follow. Instead, they lock onto whichever wave is strongest and will often flip back and forth from one station to the other as their signal strengths fluctuate.

The only way to avoid interference completely is to choose a radio frequency that no one else nearby is using. That way your transmission is certain to be stronger than any other at the same frequency and your receiver will follow only your broadcast. If you have no choice but to share a particular frequency, then you must use some encoding scheme such as digital transmission so that your receiver can tell when it's receiving a broadcast from your transmitter and not from some other transmitter. Your receiver looks for your personal encoding scheme and won't respond to that of some other transmitter. However, if that other transmitter is strong enough, it will probably prevent your receiver from detecting your transmission. That trick of overwhelming a receiver with a second transmission is the principle behind jamming of a radio transmission.

Radio waves consist of nothing more than electric and magnetic fields that are perpetually recreating one another as they travel through space at the speed of light. An electric field is a phenomenon that exerts forces on electric charges and a magnetic field is a phenomenon that exerts forces on magnetic poles. Both electric and magnetic fields contain energy because they are capable of doing work on and thus transferring energy to electric charges or magnetic poles that they encounter. In a radio wave, this energy or capacity to do work moves along with the fields at the speed of light. The radio transmitter uses electric power to create the radio wave and the radio wave delivers that power to the receiver. While most modern receivers use local electric power to amplify the information arriving in the radio wave, simple "crystal radios" are able to reproduce sound using on the power that is arriving in the radio wave itself.

AM radio waves travel remarkably long distances near dusk because of the behavior of the earth's atmosphere. A layer in the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, contains many electrically charged particles and it behaves like a poor electrical conductor. Its conductivity improves in the early evening. When low frequency radio waves encounter this conducting layer, it responds to them and reflects them just like a mirror reflects light. As a result, you can hear very distant radio stations as their waves bounce of the ionosphere. FM transmissions occur at high frequencies that are too fast for the ionosphere to reflect.

In the transmitting station, the moving charge is pumped back and forth between the ground and the antenna. The net charge in the vicinity of the station remains zero, but it is constantly being redistributed. Sometimes the antenna is positively charged and the ground is negatively charged and sometimes it's the reverse. In the receiving station, the same may be true. But there are also hand-held receivers that do not touch the ground. In that case, the receiver is still neutral, but charge is being pushed back and forth along the antenna and tank so that when the antenna is positively charged, the bottom of the tank circuit itself is negatively charged.

Yes. The transmitting antenna pushes huge amounts of charge up and down so that all of the receiving antennae respond primarily to it rather than to one another. However when many receiving antennae are very near one another, they can begin to cause trouble. In effect, each antenna draws a small amount of energy out of the radio wave. If there are too many nearby antennas, they will sap the radio wave's energy and each receiving antenna will get less than its normal amount. The other way to look at this effect is to realize that the receiving antennas actually retransmit the radio wave that they receive, but upside down. They weaken the wave as a result. If there are too many antennas around, they will reduce the wave to almost nothing.

An electric field exerts forces on electric charges while a magnetic field exerts forces on magnetic poles. If you place a positive electric charge in an upward-pointing electric field, that electric charge will accelerate upward (in the direction of the electric field). But if you place a stationary north magnetic pole (if you could find one) in that same electric field, nothing will happen. An electric field exerts no force on a stationary magnetic pole. On the other hand, if you place a north magnetic pole in an upward-pointing magnetic field, that pole will accelerate upward (in the direction of the magnetic field). But if you place a stationary positive electric charge in that same magnetic field, nothing will happen. So electric fields act on stationary electric charges and magnetic fields act on stationary magnetic poles.

In AM radio, the sound is encoded as the strength of the radio wave. If two transmitters are using the same frequency (or your receiver cannot distinguish between them due to its limited resolution), then it will responds to both of them at once. The sound that you hear will be the sum of them both, as though they were two musical instruments in the same room. In FM radio, the sound is encoded as the exact frequency of the radio wave. In this case, your receiver is likely to follow the strongest of the two stations and flip in between occasionally when their strengths change (due to weather or reflections from moving objects). Thus it is common for AM radio receivers to superpose two stations but not so common for FM radio receivers to do the same trick.

Within each portion of the wave, the local electric and magnetic fields endlessly recreate one another. But this portion of the wave heads outward from the transmitting antenna at the speed of light and is soon far away from the earth. As the transmitter changes the amount of charge on the antenna or its frequency of motion up and down, it creates new portions of the wave that may differ from the portions sent out a minute ago, a second ago, or even a few millionths of a second ago. Thus the transmitter's changes very quickly pass outward to all of the receivers nearby. The farther you are from the transmitter, the longer it takes for the various patterns in the wave to reach you and your receiver. All of the music transmitted by radio stations in the 50's is still traveling outward because the patterns emitted back then continue to travel. They are now 40 or 50 light years away from the earth and are so widely dispersed across space that it would take a phenomenally sensitive receiver to detect them. But they are out there nonetheless. Many of the searches for extraterrestrial intelligence have focused on trying to detect this sort of radio transmission across the depths of space. If other peoples have invented radio, they are quite likely to have chosen AM or FM modulation as their encoding schemes, too.

First, there isn't any charge moving in the waves themselves. The waves contain only electric and magnetic fields. These fields will push on any electric charges or magnetic poles they encounter, but they are not themselves electrically charges or magnetically poled. The amount of fields in a radio used for audio transmission depend on the station's transmitting power and on the encoding format for the music. In AM (Amplitude Modulation) encoding, the music is encoded as the strength of the radio waves. Each time the radio wave's strength goes up and down once, the speaker cone in your receiver goes forward and backward once. In FM (Frequency Modulation) encoding, the radio wave's strength remains steady but its precise frequency changes slightly. Each time the radio wave's frequency goes up and down once, the speaker cone in your receiver goes forward and backward once.

The transmitting station has an electrical oscillator, an electronic system that experiences periodic reversals of current. This oscillator contains a tank circuit or some other clock-like system that acts as a timekeeper. With the help of its timekeeper, the oscillator causes the transmitting station to send current to the main antenna tank circuit at just the right moments to sustain and enhance the sloshing current there. The oscillator and the current sloshing in the tank circuit remain in perfect synchrony with one another. One of the best clock-like systems is a quartz crystal oscillator, like that in a typical wristwatch. In a quartz oscillator, a quartz crystal vibrates like the bar of a xylophone. In a watch, these vibrations are used to control a digital clock system so that it keeps accurate time. In a transmitter, these vibrations are used to control the distribution of current to the tank circuit at the antenna.

Ultimately the only things that matter about an antenna are (1) how much charge it moves in response to the correct radio transmission and (2) how little charge it moves in response to the wrong radio transmissions. Most store bought antennas probably just boost the amount of moving charge by attaching an amplifier to an otherwise undistinguished antenna. While that trick will increase the amount of charge moving in response to the correct transmission, it will also increase the amount moving due to undesired transmissions. Almost everything electrical transmits radio waves and these may well interfere with your reception. For example, your neighbor's lawn mower may send out radio waves and introduce noise into your music. Just amplifying the antenna signal does nothing to eliminate that problem. Your best bet is to find a directional antenna; an antenna that responds most strongly to radio waves coming from a particular direction. TV antennas are typically directional, with many separate antenna elements. Satellite dishes are highly directional.

When you turn the dial on your radio, you are adjusting the resonant frequency of its tank circuit (or some electronic equivalent). The tank circuit only responds to charge sloshing on the antenna when that charge is moving back and forth at the tank circuit's resonant frequency. When you tune the tank so that its resonant frequency is the same as the broadcast frequency of your favorite radio station, it only responds to charge moving up and down at that frequency. As a result, your radio detects signals from your favorite station but no others.

Actually, there is no current flowing between the two systems. Current flowing up and down the transmitting antenna causes current to flow up and down the receiving antenna, but there is no direct connection between the two and they do not share any current. That explains how an isolated radio can still receive music. But the amount of current flowing in the receiving antenna does depend on its distance from the transmitting antenna. When the two are very close, the charge in the receiving antenna responds directly to the charge moving on the transmitting antenna. As they move apart, this direct response quickly dwindles to virtually nothing. In its place, a new effect appears. The transmitting antenna creates radio waves that exist apart from the accelerating charges that created them. The strength of the radio wave diminishes in power roughly as the square of the distance from the transmitting antenna. The electric and magnetic fields diminish in power roughly in proportion to this distance. The current flowing in the receiving antenna also falls roughly in proportion to this distance.

The length of an antenna is very important. If the antenna is too short, the charges will reach its end too soon and the charge will not flow very smoothly back and forth in it. If the antenna is too long, the charges will not reach its end before it is time for them to reverse directions and some of the antenna will not be used (it will actually cause more trouble than help). Thus there is an ideal length for the antenna and this length depends on the frequency of the radio wave it is trying to create. But it is also possible to shorten an antenna by delaying the flow of charge to its ends. Adding a coil to the antenna (an inductor) will slow the flow of current through the antenna and make a short antenna behave like a longer antenna. Most portable AM radios use a coiled antenna that behaves as though it were much longer than its physical length. FM radios work best with antennas that are about 1 meter long.