Quantification of the impact of the antenna non-idealities in UWB transmission systems

In this paper the quantification of the impact of the pulse distortion of antennas on the UWB transmission is presented. As a criterion for the evaluation the fidelity is derived. For verification the system performance of a line of sight transmission, i.e. the bit error rate, for a bow-tie antenna is evaluated, based on measurements. It is shown that the fidelity significantly influences the BER, excluding interference from noise or other sources. The result is that for UWB impulse operations in communications, but also in Radar applications, besides the signal to noise ratio also the fidelity of the antennas has to be taken into account.