A modified bow-tie antenna design for step-frequency subsurface radar applications

A modified bow-tie antenna for step-frequency ground penetrating radar is proposed. The flared dipole arm consists of a metal sector gradually converting into a strip-slot structure loaded by resistive films. For the comparison, a TEM horn is used. The synthesized pulse waveform is computed from the frequency-domain data using a calibration procedure and inverse Fourier transform. The antenna performance is demonstrated in several examples of detecting small shallowly buried subsurface targets.