An Ultrawide Band Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna for Airborne GPR Application

An ultrawide band (UWB) antipodal Vivaldi antenna is designed for airborne ground penetrating radar (GPR) system. With exponential tapered slots and slot edges, the presented antenna demonstrates a wide operating band from 300 MHz to more than 2 GHz. The fabricated prototype of this antenna with a compact size of 450 mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times \,\, 600$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times \,\, 1.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm has been measured in anechoic chamber. Both simulation and experimental results show that good radiation patterns with gain 4.4–11.5 dBi in the endfire direction could be achieved in the whole working band, which indicates that the proposed antenna is suitable for airborne GPR application.

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