Vivaldi shaped TEM horn fed ridged horn antenna design for UWB GPR systems

Abstract

This paper deals with ultra-wide band (UWB) TEM horn antenna types, which are suitable for hand-held and vehicle mounted impulse GPR systems. On this scope, conventional, dielectric loaded, Vivaldi form, multi-sensor adaptive, and array configurations of the TEM horn structure are designed, simulated and measured. The Vivaldi shaped TEM horn fed ridged horn antenna prototype is proposed as a novel design to reach hyper-wide band radiation performance from 400 MHz up to 18 GHz for multi-band GPR operation that can provide high resolution imaging. The numerical and experimental results are presented and compared.