Low-Profile EndFire Leaky-Wave Antenna With Air Media

A low-profile endfire leaky-wave antenna is proposed in this paper. The proposed low profile antenna utilizes microstrip line to excite planar inverted-L antenna (PILA) elements. Air media is utilized in the proposed array to realize the endfire property. By using air media, the proposed leaky-wave array maintains phase constant slightly larger than the wavenumber in free space and achieves endfire radiation. PILA elements are periodically spaced to radiate and the spacing period is designed as λ
₀
/4 (λ
₀
is the wavelength in free space) to achieve a relatively wide impedance bandwidth. A prototype of the proposed endfire antenna is fabricated and tested. The measured results are consistent with full-wave simulation results. The length of the whole leaky-wave array is about 6λ
₀
, and the measured gain in the endfire direction is 11.5 dBi at 5.1 GHz.