A Tapered Continuous-Element Leaky-Wave Antenna With Pure Radiation Pattern

A tapered continuous-element leaky-wave antenna is presented, which has the merits of suppressed higher order harmonics and reduced sidelobe level (SLL). Two important design strategies are utilized for assuring good radiation pattern purity. First, the phase difference between the main radiating edge in each unit cell is disturbed to avoid higher order mode superpositioning in-phase. Second, an extra element with a relatively large phase constant is introduced for canceling the field of the first sidelobe location. The measurement results show a continuous scanning beam with an equalized gain is achieved at the frequency band of 5.6-8.8 GHz, the corresponding normalized SLL is decreased to about -20 dB and the radiation of HOH in the high frequencies is null at the backward direction.