Stripline Fed Slotted Edge Balanced Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna for Advanced Radar Applications

Abstract

A compact exponentially tapered balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna for modern radar systems is proposed in this paper. The proposed design implements slanted rectangular slots at the flare edges to improve impedance bandwidth typically at lower frequencies. The antenna is coupled to a 50 Ω microstrip line between the signal conductors of the middle layer and ground plane. A detailed parametric analysis has been carried out to determine the optimized dimensions and to achieve desired antenna performance. A prototype of the antenna (56 × 28 × 1.6 mm3 ) was fabricated and measured to validate the simulation results. It is revealed that the antenna has a wide impedance bandwidth of 120% over 5–20 GHz and measured gain of the antenna increases from 2.6 dB to 8.0 dB in the whole operational frequency band. The small aperture width which is typically 28 mm is an attractive feature of the proposed design. Therefore, compact size, high gain, ultrawide bandwidth, and directional radiation characteristics of the proposed design may be suitable for advance radar systems.