Non-Standard tapering of leaky-wave antennas in hybrid technology

This paper illustrates for the first time the ability of leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) in hybrid waveguide printed-circuit technology to provide non-standard simultaneous tapering of the phase and the leakage rate of the constituent leaky mode. This unusual tapering allows synthesis of broadbeam radiation patterns with high rejection out of the prescribed beamwidth , high efficiency focusing near field patterns , or highly directive conformal antennas . The proposed hybrid technology offers a much simpler and more flexible mechanism to design this unusual type of tapered LWAs, if compared to LWAs in pure waveguide or pure printed-circuit technologies.