A broad beam and broad band tapered leaky wave antenna

In this paper, the broadband and broadbeam leaky-wave antennas based on tapered design has been proposed end investigated. The new tapered leaky-wave antenna (LWA) was designed, using a physical grounding structure along the length of the antenna (to connect the conductor strip and the ground plane), and running a simple procedure which uses an FDTD code. The use of a physical grounding structure, allows to use only half of the structure, the adoption´of a simple feeding, and the reduction ofsidelobes. The good performance of this new tapered microstrip LWA are mainly wider band, higher gain and higher efficiency whit reference to conventional uniform microstrip LWAs. Bending the tapered LWA, the major performance of this antenna were the wider beam of radiation pattern and a further reduction of back lobes. Moreover since the tapering of linear L WA involves the variation of both phase and leakage constant, all the emitted rays are focused in a corresponding angular interval, allowing to obtain from the ray-optical model a .closed formula to predict the main beam angle of tapered LWA.