The Design of an Ultra-Wideband Circularly Polarized Antipodal Exponential Tapered Slot Antenna

Circular polarized(CP) antennas are widely utilized in various industries. It is found that antipodal tapered slot antenna(ATSA) demonstrates some extraordinary qualities in CP radiation. In this paper, the basic ATSA model has been established in HFSS simulation software. The shape of the slot curve is changed from linear to exponential, leading an impressively increase of the CP bandwidth. The qualified parameter of the antenna is obtained. To validate the accuracy, a prototype of the antenna is fabricated and measured. The measured results match well with the simulated results. Experimental results show that the proposed antenna can achieve a bandwidth of 56.8% (8.92-16 GHz) for both AR < 3 dB and VSWR < 2. The average gain is above 12.4 dB in all frequencies. The proposed antenna is easy to manufacture and is a suitable candidate for high performance CP antenna.