A novel tapered leaky wave antenna

A novel layout of leaky-wave antennas based on tapered design has been proposed and investigated. The new tapered leaky-wave antenna (LWA) was designed running a simple procedure which use an FDTD code, and using a physical grounding structure along the length of the antenna, which allows to use only half of the structure, the adoption of a simple feeding, and the reduction of sidelobes. The good performance of this new tapered microstrip LWA are mainly wider band of 33% for VSWR<2, higher gain (12 dBi) and higher efficiency (up to 85%). These performance can be improved furthermore using an array whit a double LWAs (bandwidth of 39.6% for VSWR<2 and gain of 3.5 dBi).