Directional and wideband antenna for ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications

This paper presents a directional and wideband antenna for ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications. The antenna is designed by introducing slots on bowtie patch. The design is implemented on FR4 board with dielectric constant of 4.7 and thickness of 0.8 mm. As a result of having thinner substrate, the design is compact and light weight. The bowtie antenna performance is investigated across 0.5 GHz to 3 GHz. The parametric study of the length and location of slot are also demonstrated in this paper to obtaining the best return loss across widest operational bandwidth. The both simulated and fabricated antenna bandwidth are more than 50% (fractional bandwidth). The additional reflector is included at the back of bowtie antenna in the simulation for obtaining directional radiation pattern and high gain. The comparison between simulated and measured reflection coefficient is also presented.