If someone has a high SWR, obviously their signal will not make it out as far due to reflections. However, they will still be able to hear relatively well.
I have noticed for receive, a high SWR may cause the signal to fade a small amount, but nothing compared to transmit.
How does SWR fit into the law of reciprocity?
High SWR on the transmitter means that less power gets radiated. Received SNR (signal to noise ratio) is degraded.
High SWR on the receiver side means that both signal + noise reaching the antenna are equally attenuated when reaching the receiver. As long as you are still above the receiver's sensitivity, the SNR is practically unaffected.
Now if you think of a RF transistor that has 5 ohms of input impedance and the gain of the transistor is about 20dB over the specified band when the input is matched to 5 ohms. SWR, the measure of the reflected wave will be high because you are measuring it with a 50 ohms network analyzer but you will get the highest transmission(S21).
To be more precise if the device does not have active components(passive) ====> Bad SWR, Bad Transmission.
On the other hand if the device has active components you can't say anything by looking just at the SWR.
