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 12mm (0:16 lambda0,lambda0 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 coe±cient 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.