A Meandering Slotline Leaky-Wave Antenna for Back-to-Forward Beam-Scanning

A novel meandering slotline leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with groove slow-wave structure is proposed in this paper. First, a meandering slotline is derived from a conventional microstrip rampart line. To suppress the cross-polarization level in E-plane, the meandering slotline is symmetrically inserted, and a new periodic LWA is obtained. Subsequently, grooves are introduced for slow-wave operation and the open-stopband (OSB) elimination, which leads to a −44° to 32° continuous beam-scanning. An antenna prototype is fabricated and tested. The measured peak gain reaches 8.18 dBi. Both the simulated and measured results demonstrate that the OSB has been suppressed successfully.