A Grooved Half-Mode Waveguide Leaky-Wave Antenna for Vertically-Polarized Endfire Radiation

Abstract

A high-gain low-profile leaky-wave antenna (LWA) for vertically-polarized (VP) fixed-beam endfire radiation is proposed in this article. The LWA is composed of two back-to-back half-mode waveguides with grooves etched at the margins of both radiation edges. By etching grooves, the phase velocity of the traveling wave can be tailored to slower than the wave velocity in free space for fitting the Hansen–Woodyard condition. Compared with periodic LWAs, the proposed antenna continuously radiates at two symmetric apertures, contributing to a high endfire gain. A prototype is fabricated and tested to validate the concept. The measured and simulated results are in good agreement. A simulated gain of 14.29 dBi and a measured gain of 13.37 dBi are achieved within an antenna length of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.05\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Moreover, a measured overlapping bandwidth of 2.74–3.17 GHz (14.3%) is realized with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S_{11} &lt; - 10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB and gain variation less than 3 dB. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed VP endfire LWA realizes the highest aperture efficiency and shows great advantages in high gain, low profile, and wide bandwidth.