One way of thinking about the operation of such an antenna is to consider a parasitic element to be a normal dipole element of finite diameter fed at its centre, with a short circuit across its feed point. As is well known in transmission line theory, a short circuit reflects all of the incident power 180 degrees out of phase. So one could as well model the operation of the parasitic element as the superposition of a dipole element receiving power and sending it down a transmission line to a matched load, and a transmitter sending the same amount of power up the transmission line back toward the antenna element. If the transmitted voltage wave were 180 degrees out of phase with the received wave at that point, the superposition of the two voltage waves would give zero voltage, equivalent to shorting out the dipole at the feedpoint (making it a solid element, as it is). Thus a half-wave parasitic element radiates a wave 180° out of phase with the incident wave.