An ultrawideband coplanar waveguide-fed tapered ring slot antenna

In this paper, we present a new coplanar waveguide-fed tapered ring slot antenna for ultrawideband (UWB) applications. This antenna consists of a 50 Ω coplanar waveguide feeding line, wideband coplanar waveguide-to-slotline transition, and a pair of curved radiating slots. The impedance bandwidth with VSWR<2 is from 3.1 GHz to more than 12 GHz. The actual operating bandwidth is, however, limited by the distortion of radiation patterns. Such pattern distortion can be attributed to the antenna mode transition and is investigated in this paper with the help of the radiation patterns in the traditional sense as well as a dimensionless normalized antenna transfer function. By suitably allocating such mode-transition phenomenon to the notched band in a UWB radio, we demonstrate that antennas with desirable radiation characteristics in both UWB low and high bands can be readily achieved. The system responses of a transceiving antenna system in free space are addressed as well.