LOW-PROFILE DIRECTIONAL ULTRA-WIDEBAND ANTENNA FOR SEE-THROUGH-WALL IMAGING APPLICATIONS

A compact-size planar antenna with ultra-wideband (UWB) bandwidth and directional patterns is presented. The antenna can be fabricated on a printed circuit board (PCB). On one side of the PCB, it has a circular patch, and on the other side it has a slot-embedded ground plane with a fork-shaped feeding stub in the slot. Directional radiation is achieved by using a reflector below the antenna. To reduce the thickness of the antenna, a new low-profile antenna configuration is proposed. Three types of directional UWB antennas are analyzed. The distance between the antenna and the reflector is 12 mm (0.16 λ0, λ0 is the free space wavelength at the lowest frequency). In order to validate the design, a prototype is also fabricated and measured. Measured results agree well with the simulated ones. The measured results confirm that the proposed antenna features a reflection coefficient below -10 dB over the UWB range from 4.2 GHz to 8.5 GHz, a maximum gain around 9 dBi, a front-to-back ratio over 17 dB and pulse fidelity higher than 90% in the time domain. Thus it is promising for see-through-wall imaging applications