A simple design of broadband tapered leaky-wave antenna

A new layout of leaky-wave antennas based on tapered design has been proposed and investigated. The new curve 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 side-lobes. 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%). Moreover if the relative dielectric constant of the substrate approaches 1 (epsilon(r) = epsilon(0)), the leaky wave antenna bandwidth becomes much wider improving its performance. (C) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.