WIDEBAND RCS REDUCTION OF VIVALDI ANTENNA BASED ON SUBSTRATE INTEGRATED WAVEGUIDE

A novel design for radar cross section (RCS) reduction of a bilateral Vivaldi antenna is presented. The method for RCS reduction is based on the wave-guiding characteristic of the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) structure, which guides the incident energy to the lateral side of antenna plane. The bistatic RCS is controlled under the premise of reducing the monostatic RCS. Compared with the reference antenna, a significant monostatic RCS reduction is achieved over a wide frequency band ranging from 5GHz to 12GHz, and a remarkable monostatic RCS reduction at 7GHz is as much as 34.73 dB without obvious radiation performance degradation. To verify the proposed strategy, prototypes of the reference and proposed antennas have been fabricated and measured. Good agreements between the simulated and measured results demonstrate that the proposed method preserves the radiation performances well and achieves an outstanding wideband RCS reduction.