Single-conductor strip leaky-wave antenna

Abstract

This paper presents a leaky-wave antenna with only a single-conductor strip on a substrate without a practical ground plane. The full-wave integral equation method is used to investigate the EH01 leaky mode of this single-conductor strip structure. When this single-conductor strip is on a thin substrate with a low dielectric constant, a broad-band radiation regime can exist for the EHO01 leaky mode. The balanced microstrip lines and the inverted balanced microstrip lines are used to excite this EH01 leaky mode. This work presents both the numerically simulated and measured data. The measured bandwidth of a voltage standing-wave ratio less than or equal to 2 is from 6.55-13.75 GHz (2.34:1). In this case, the normalized phase constant is very close to I and this results in a fixed main-beam radiation pattern in the end-fire direction. This leaky-wave antenna with only a single rectangle stripline of length 110 mm can achieve the same broad-band performance as a tapered microstrip leaky wave antenna with a length 310 mm, as previously reported by the authors.