Miniaturized Tapered-Slot Ultra-wideband Vivaldi Antenna for Ice Sounding Radar

Abstract

This paper presents a novel high-gain miniaturized tapered-slot ultra-wideband Vivaldi antenna for ice-sounding radar applications. To miniaturize the antenna and improve the impedance matching and antenna gain of conventional tapered- slot Vivaldi antenna, tapered slot edge, circular cavity, rectangular cavity, inner circular patch, and rectangular slit structures are newly designed and introduced. The simulation results show that the designed Vivaldi antenna reduces the size by 15 % and increases the peak realized gain by up to 5.1 dBi, compared to the conventional Vivaldi antenna. The optimized Vivaldi antenna was fabricated and characterized for its antenna performance. The simulated results are in good agreement with the measured results.