I was recently reading an interesting article from the ARRL to get a better understanding of the SWR.
The following case is still unclear: A low loss feed-line with an impedance that doesn't match the antenna's impedance and the receiver's impedance.
In this case a large part of the signal should "bounces" back and forth into the feed-line due to the impedance mismatch. At this point the article states that:
The energy bounces back and forth inside the cable until it’s all radiated by the antenna for a lossless transmission line. An important point to realize is that with extremely low loss transmission line, no matter what the SWR, most of the power can get delivered to the antenna.
I understand that during each "bounce", due to the impedance mismatch, some amount of energy will be transmitted and the rest reflected.
I don't understand how this transmitted power could be useful. After "bouncing" back and forth the part of the signal that will be transmitted will probably be out of phase with the signal sent by the transmitter. Even if by any luck the reflected signal and the signal currently sent by the transmitter happened to be in phase, the information conveyed wouldn't be the same.
So to me, even if almost of the power is transmitted, due to the high SWR most of this power should be just noise and don't improve the quality of the transmission in any case. But it's not what the article seems to explain. What did I miss ?