A New Broadband Microstrip Leaky - Wave Antenna

摘要

This paper presents a novel design of a curve tapered leaky-wave antenna (LWA). An FDTD code was used to extract the propagation constant of a microstrip LWA and to run a simple algorithm to design its layout. A physical grounding structure along the length of the antenna allows the adoption of a simple feeding planar line and the reduction of sidelobes. Moreover, the proposed design of LWA has interesting performance both for its bandwidth, (up to 33% for VSWR< 2) and for its gain (more than 12 dBi peak power gain at 10.5 GHz), compared with conventional planar microstrip LWAs which work in the same frequency range but with narrower bandwidth (20% VSWR< 2) and peak power gain less than 10 dBi. A prototype of a LWA proposed, was made showing a good agreement between experimental and theoretical results.