UWB characteristics of disc cone antenna

Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has attracted much attention and demands for UWB antennas with omnidirectional coverage are increasing. The conventional solution to achieve omnidirectional radiation in a horizontal plane is to use a thin wire dipole or monopole with a ground plane. However, these suffer from a narrow impedance bandwidth. Disc cone antennas have been employed for many years in the microwave frequency range because of their broadband characteristics. Their radiation is omnidirectional in azimuth. The disc cone antenna is a special case of biconical antenna; its impedance and radiation characteristics are mainly determined by the angle of the cone and the diameter of the disc. The length of the cone and the dimensions of the feeding structure limit the antenna´s lowest and highest frequencies. We characterize the disc cone antenna, not only by classical frequency domain parameters, such as impedance, gain and radiation patterns, but also by time domain parameters, such as transfer function and fidelity. The results show that the disc cone antenna has acceptable performance for UWB applications.