Dielectric Image Line-Based Leaky-Wave Antenna for Wide Range of Beam Scanning Through Broadside

In this communication, a dielectric image line (DIL)-based leaky-wave antenna is proposed with planar feeding. The dominant mode of DIL is perturbed by making holes periodically in the DIL and fast-wave space harmonics are generated. The proposed antenna is designed for Ku-band (12-18 GHz) and its impedance bandwidth in the fast-wave region is 36% (11.8-17 GHz). The scan range of the proposed antenna in the working band is 90° (-65° to 25°) and the gain is varying from 10 to 16 dBi in the fast-wave region. The proposed antenna can be directly scaled to other frequency bands by taking into account the corresponding dispersion characteristic in respective frequency bands. This scaling property is demonstrated in V-band. A prototype is fabricated and measured in Ku-band, which fairly agrees with simulated results.