Unidirectional low profile ultra-wideband antenna for radar and communication applications

One of the important elements in all UWB radar and communication systems are the antenna elements, which are required to be compact, light weight and to have good radiation characteristics. The most commonly used directional UWB antennas are Vivaldi antennas and ridged horn antennas. Vivaldi antennas are typically required to be a few wavelengths long to have good matching a reasonable gain which limits their use in low frequency UWB radars such as GPRs and see-through-all radars where the low operating frequency is required to penetrate moist soil or lossy walls. Ridged horns offer significantly higher gain at a smaller size but they are relatively expensive and bulky. To overcome these limitations, we present a new compact lightweight UWB antenna that has comparable gain to ridged horns but is almost 1/5th the size.