Abstract - An approach based on Prony's method is used to find the spatial poles of straight wires of varying length and radius from the far-field patterns. For the antenna case, poles having the largest residues are found near the feed region and antenna ends; smaller ones are found outside these regions. The poles are attributed to radiation from the exciting source and wire ends, due to charge acceleration, and from a slightly damped traveling wave. In the scattering case, the poles with the largest residues are located at the wire's ends for near—axial incidence and are again due to end radiation. By examining the residue magnitudes as a function of wire radius, a correlation is found with radiation from the feed region of an infinite antenna and from the ends of a semi-infinite antenna.