Received: 26 May 2019

DOI: 10.1002/mop.32338

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Wideband tapered slot antenna 1 | INTRODUCTION

for applications in ground Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a widely used technology
for detection and identification of buried metallic and non-
penetrating radar metallic targets. Recent advancements in GPR technology
has helped in expansion in its use in a wide range of indus-
Ali Raza1,2 | Wenbin Lin1,3 | tries. These days GPR use is not limited to subsurface
1
objects detection but also for nondestructive testing, concrete
Yanzheng Chen | Zhang Yanting1 | inspection, forensics, rescue operation of trapped victims
Hassan Tariq Chattha4 | under collapsed buildings or landslide, pre-excavation map-
ping in archeology, civil surveying, road inspection, and
Abu Bakar Sharif2
mining.1
Due to the effectiveness of GPR technology, it has been
1
School of Physical Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong used extensively in the structural investigation, building
University, Chengdu, China
material testing, highway and bridge construction for devel-
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Government College University
opment as well as for the improvement of safety conditions.
Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan
3
GPR works on the basic principle of transmitting electro-
School of Mathematics and Physics, University of South China, Hengyang,
magnetic waves in the ground, which is a nonhomogeneous
China
4
medium. For the detection of buried targets at various
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic
University in Madinah, Al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia
depths, GPR antennas must have ultra-wideband (UWB)
characteristics. Therefore antenna plays the most critical role
Correspondence in the system. Most GPR systems need to use antennas that
Wenbin Lin, School of Mathematics and Physics, University of South
have a frequency of operation from a few megahertz to giga-
China, Hengyang, China.
Email: lwb@usc.edu.cn
hertz covering bandwidth from minimum octave up to
decade.2 Lower frequencies are used for the detection of tar-
Funding information gets in deeper depths but provide lower resolution, whereas
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers:
a good resolution is achieved at high frequencies which are
11947404, 11647314, 11847307
used in the detection of small targets in shallow depths.
Two basic types of GPR systems are continuous wave
Abstract radar and impulse radar. Continuous wave radars operate in
A planar slotted patch antenna is proposed for ground penetrat- the frequency domain and transmit continuously, whereas
ing radar (GPR). The proposed antenna has a wide bandwidth impulse radars operate in the time domain and use impulse
ranging from 600 MHz to 4 GHz. Tapered slot feeding, curved technique by sending a time pulse of nanosecond and sub-
ground plane, and slot loading are used for a wideband opera- nanoseconds to an antenna to produce an electromagnetic
tion, whereas resistive loading is utilized for removal of notch wave. Impulse radars are often used commercially due to its
band. Current loops made by slots are bifurcated with the use advantage of low-cost parts and less complexity in design.3
of 50 Ω resistors. The antenna is designed and optimized to Antennas used in GPRs are categorized into two struc-
achieve good performance, especially at lower frequencies tural types, three dimensional (3D) structures, and planner
while keeping the antenna’s physical dimension relatively antennas. 3D antennas include cone, spiral, and horn anten-
small. The time-domain analysis of the antenna is performed, nas.4-6 Although 3D antennas provide good UWB perfor-
and the comparative graph is added after analysis to validate its mance for applications in GPR but suffer from large size and
performance in the impulse-based radar. Furthermore, a sand- high weight, to enhance the portability of the overall system
box test is conducted; the experimental results show the signifi- antenna must be compact and lightweight, so that GPR can
cance of the proposed antenna toward GPR application. be easily maneuverable and less labour-intensive, preferably
operatable by one person.
KEYWORDS Optimization of GPR antennas keeping in view of
ground penetrating radar, planar antenna, resistively loaded antenna, wideband dimensions and weight resulted in the development of plan-
ner antennas, which are compact, less complex, and

Microw Opt Technol Lett. 2020;1–7. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mop © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1
2 RAZA ET AL.
lightweight designs. The antennas on planner substrates have
advantage of compactness, lightweight, show similar radia-
tion properties as of 3D designs and have less complexity in
design and fabrication. Whereas, planner antennas have
lower radiation efficiency.7 Examples of these designs
include dipole, bowtie, Vivaldi, tapper slot antenna, and
antipodal antenna.8-13
A bowtie antenna9 is presented for applications in GPR;
this design achieved an operating frequency of 0.5 to 3 GHz.
For gain enhancement, a reflector is used which increased
the dimension of the antenna. The size of this bowtie is
27 × 18 × 11 cm3. Another considerable antenna design
used for UWB operation is Vivaldi10 operating in 0.7 to
2.7 GHz, with dimensions of 26 × 25.4 cm2. Recently
microstrip antipodal Vivaldi antenna11 is presented operating
in 0.3 to 2 GHz, which provides good UWB performance
and high gain, increasing the overall dimension of the
antenna, that is, 45 × 60 cm2.
Regarding compactness “Tapered Slot antennas” have
gained the attention of researchers because of its small
dimensions. A planar tapered slot antenna for (GPR) system
is proposed in Reference 12. The operating frequency of this
design is 0.6 to 6 GHz while achieving dimensions of
13 × 7 cm2. Another presented compact slot antenna13 has a
size of 10.7 × 7 × 5 cm3. The operating frequency of this
design is from 1.4 to 3.5 GHz. This design suffers from nar-
row bandwidth and does not operate at lower frequencies.
Similar design using slot-loaded bowtie antenna for GPR is
presented14 achieving small dimensions of 10.77 × 6.8 cm2,
operating frequency is from 0.98 to 4.5 GHz. Although these
coplanar waveguides (CPW) fed slot-loaded designs are
compact but have the disadvantage of low gain profile,
whereas in Reference 14 this problem is solved by placing a
hollow cube reflector of size 20 × 15 × 4 cm3 which led to
the increase in the overall size of the antenna.
F I G U R E 1 Proposed antenna’s structure. A, Top View. B, Bottom
view (ground plane) [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
In this letter, a monopole tapered slot antenna is pres-
ented, suitable for applications in GPR. The proposed
antenna is designed using planner and simple structure, easy
to fabricate, lightweight, and radiation symmetry. The pres-
ented antenna covers a wide bandwidth range from
600 MHz to 4 GHz. When compared with other antennas
working in the same bandwidth, the size of the proposed
antenna is comparatively compact. The presented antenna is
designed by investigation of essential design requirements,
including dimension, weight, and radiation characteristics.
After a detailed analysis and many modifications in antenna
design, the resistive loading (RL) technique is adopted due
to its effectiveness for eliminating impedance mismatch, to
enhance its operation on lower frequencies and to improve
structural efficiency.
2 | ANTENNA DESCRIPTION
The geometrical diagram and shape of the proposed antenna
are shown in Figure 1. Monopole patch antenna provides a
better gain profile on lower frequency bands as compared to
CPW fed designs but suffer from the narrow band of opera-
tion.15 Many techniques are used to achieve wideband oper-
ation of the antenna while keeping the size of antenna
compact. Modified feeding strip, slot loading, RL in patch,
and ground plane optimization can be seen in the antenna
structure. The presented antenna is fed by a tapered feed
strip of length LF and feed width of WF and width at the top
of the feed is 0.6 mm shown by “g.” The top of the feed line
is split into two lines of length L1 connected by a line of
length L2. A split feed is chosen to have better control over
characteristics impedance.
The main radiator of antenna has length 160 mm and
width 90 mm. Three elliptical slots are cut in radiator, each
slot of horizontal radius 60 mm and vertical radius 10 mm,
which resulted in the creation of magnetic dipoles to split
current. Furthermore, for enhancement of lower band of
operation, three resistors of value 50 Ω each are added in
slots shown in Figure 1A by R1, R2, and R3. To keep design
lightweight and low cost, commonly available FR4 material
is used as a substrate for design and fabrication of the
antenna. The relative permittivity of the substrate is 4.3 and
has a thickness of 1.6 mm. The length and widths of the sub-
strate are represented as Ls and Ws, respectively. SMA con-
nector is used to feed the antenna.
The ground plane of the antenna shown in Figure 1B is
modified by bending the top of the ground patch for better
operation at the lower frequency. The width of the ground
plane is the same as the substrate, whereas Lg represents the
length of the ground plane. The ground plane is constructed
using one square of length SH and width Ws. The top corners
of the ground plane are rounded using an ellipse of a hori-
zontal radius of L4 and vertical radius of L3. The combined
length of square SH and vertical radius L3 of the ellipse is
RAZA ET AL. 3

equal to the total length of the ground plane. Antenna opti-
mization is carried out by antenna mentioned above design
parameters; compact size is achieved while maintaining the
desired performance. The overall size of the antenna is
18 × 22 cm2. The Structural dimensions of the design are
shown in Table 1.
3 | WORKING PRINCIPLE
Antenna performance can be improved by optimizing many
antenna parameters that affect broadband operation. In the
presented antenna, four fundamental structural changes hel-
ped to obtain the desired design objectives. As it is well-
known compact, lightweight, low cost, and able to operate
on wideband, that is, from 0.5 to 3 GHz are essential require-
ments of GPR antenna.4
3.1 | Effect of the loaded resistor
The requirements of antenna size reduction at lower frequen-
cies and achieving large bandwidth simultaneously make the
GPR antenna design a challenging task.16 RL technique is
found useful to obtain lower operation bands without having
any impact on the overall size of the antenna.3,17 Resistively
loaded antennas have disadvantage of lower gain due to
power dissipation in resistors, despite their lower gain resis-
tively loaded antenna are frequently used in GPRs.5,12,18,19
For application of antennas in GPR increase in resistor value
increases amplitude of received signal.19
Furthermore, antenna back radiation can be reflected to
illuminate ground in GPR application. Thus antenna backing
solutions including reflector,9 cavity,14 choke rings,20 and
loop directors18 are used to enhance gain of planner anten-
nas. Whereas, in the proposed design, planner and relatively
less complex designing techniques of slot loading and RL
are utilized. The surface current distribution of the proposed
antenna is shown in Figure 2. More precisely, the resistors
are not interrupting the surface current at frequencies higher
than 1 GHz, in spite, there is more evenly surface current
distribution in case of resistors, which helped to attain better
gain performance of the proposed antenna.21
Loop currents are formed in the antenna by introducing
elliptical slots; however, as it can be seen from Figure 2A,
there is a current cancelation effect at the center of the loop
due to the symmetrical structure of loop. This current cancel-
ation produces a notched band at 1.1 and 1.7 GHz. There-
fore, the antenna design is equipped with three resistors to
mitigate these current cancelations, which further help to
reduce the band notch to get wide bandwidth. A slight deg-
radation in radiation efficiency is caused by RL, therefore,
an optimal value of 50 Ω is used for minimal degradation
and better impedance matching. The voltage standing wave
ratio voltage standing wave ratio <2 on a wide band from
0.6 to 4 GHz is achieved as shown in Figure 3. The round
corners on the antenna have been evaluated and the result is
shown in Figure 3. At lower frequency the current mainly
flows at the edges of antenna. The rounding of the corners in
the radiating patch shortens the current path, distorting the
UWB performance of the antenna.
4 | RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
To verify the performance of the proposed antenna, the
antenna is fabricated and measured as shown in Figure 4.
The return loss result of the proposed antenna using different
substrates is displayed in Figure 5. Agilent vector network
analyzer fieldfox N9923A is used for measurement of reflec-
tion coefficient S11 of the proposed antenna is shown in
Figure 6. A slight mismatch between simulated and

TABLE 1 Antenna dimensions

Antenna Values Antenna Values

dimensions (mm) dimensions (mm)
Ls 220 Lg 110
Ws 180 L3 20.6
LF 111 L4 20.2
WF 3.6 SH 60
L1 3.8 g 0.6 F I G U R E 2 Distributed current at the frequency 600 MHz. A,
Without resistive loading. B, With resistive loading [Color figure can
L2 19.5
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
4 RAZA ET AL.
F I G U R E 3 Voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) with resistive
loading and round corner effect [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
F I G U R E 4 Measurement of, A, return loss using vector network
analyzer; B, radiation patterns in an anechoic chamber [Color figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
F I G U R E 5 Return loss—S11 on different substrate [Color figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
F I G U R E 6 Simulated and measured return loss—S11 of proposed
design [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
F I G U R E 7 The gain of the proposed antenna [Color figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
measured results is caused by fabrication tolerance, manual
welding, and measurement error. The proposed antenna is
radiating from 0.6 to 4 GHz. Peak achieved gain is 4 dB gain
of the antenna is shown in Figure 7. The antenna exhibits
good gain at lower frequencies. Additional small loop cur-
rents are created with RL, which enhanced structural effi-
ciency. The antenna poses much evenly distributed surface
current as compared to the one without resistors. Therefore,
the enhancement in the surface current resulted in the
increase in the gain of the proposed antenna for lower fre-
quencies. There is significant increase in the gain at 1 GHz,
while there is slight increase at other frequencies. It is worth
mentioning here that the gain at 0.6 GHz is decreased a bit,
which is due to the power dissipation in resistors.
The omnidirectional far-field radiation pattern plots of
this antenna in two-dimensions at frequencies of 0.6, 1, 1.5,
and 3 GHz are shown in Figure 8. The radiation pattern of
RAZA ET AL.
F I G U R E 8 Radiation pattern of resistive loaded slotted antenna. A, 0.6 GHz; B, 1 GHz; C, 1.5 GHz; D, 3 GHz [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
F I G U R E 9 Normalized time-domain IO signal of the designed
antenna [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
the proposed antenna remains stable on the entire operating
frequency range.
Performance of an antenna in the impulse GPR system at
a particular frequency and bandwidth, there are few
5
constraints of antenna’s operation in the time domain. For
better image quality and higher resolution, short impulse
response and absence of ringing are required. For evaluation
of the proposed antenna performance in the time domain, an
amplitude modulated plane wave as a Gaussian Pulse is
applied to the antenna. The time-domain characteristics are
evaluated by assuming a plane wave propagation. Small
late-time ringing and reflections degraded the expansion of
bandwidth at lower frequencies. Both direct input wave and
received reflected signal are shown in Figure 9.
The antenna radiation efficiency is shown in Figure 10.
The peak radiation efficiency of proposed antenna is 90%.
The performance of the proposed antenna is compared with
other designs in literature and analysis is presented in
Table 2.
5 | EXPERIMENT
The performance of the proposed antenna has also been
evaluated above sandy soil. An electromagnetic field sen-
sor as a loop antenna transmitter was used and placed
6 RAZA ET AL.

below the surface of sandy soil.22 The proposed antenna ground due to the loading effect of soil. Therefore, the
was placed above the surface for measurement of antenna’s antenna is kept very close to the surface to improve the
ability to be used in GPR.23 A physical model for the test is detectability of buried targets.25
set up as shown in Figure 11A. Sandbox test is conducted
as shown in Figure 11B. Vector network analyzer Agilent
E5071C is used to calculate antenna’s reflection coefficient
S21. The result obtained from the electromagnetic field
sensor is shown in Figure 12. The antenna is tested in
pair configuration at 4 cm above sandy soil. The measured
parasitic coupling level of the antenna is lower than
−30 dB. The proposed antenna exhibits better performance
at lower frequency range of operation.24 GPR test result
showed the operating frequencies are due to its more direc-
tive radiation patterns and wide of the antenna over the
entire frequency band. The GPR antenna is placed above
the soil, which is modeled as a dielectric. The soil will act
as part of the GPR system when the height of the antenna
above ground is kept very low. For practical application in
GPR system, impedance mismatch occurs due to the air
gap between soil and antenna. As a result, the coupling F I G U R E 1 1 Sandbox experiment. A, Diagram of the
experiment. B, Picture of the experiment [Color figure can be viewed at
level decreases as the antenna is brought closer to the
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

F I G U R E 1 0 Radiation efficiency against frequency in GHz of

proposed antenna [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com] FIGURE 12 Measured S21 return loss of the proposed antenna

TABLE 2 Proposed antenna’s comparative analysis with already existing antennas

Antenna Frequency Peak Peak Complexity/ease

Reference Structure Shape dimensions (mm2) (GHz) gain efficiency of manufacturing
Ali et al4 3D Cone 158 × 158 × 174 0.5 to 3 4.4 80% Complex/costly
5
Crocker and Scott 3D Sinuous 10 × 10 × 9 2 to 6 7 Not reported Complex
6
Ahmed et al 3D Horn 89.2 × 49.2 × 78.2 1.4 to 11 12 Not reported Complex/costly
10
Dong et al Planner Vivaldi 26 × 25 0.7 to 2.7 7.4 78% Complex
8
Pennock and Jenks Planner Teardrop 20 × 30 0.5 to 2.5 0 Not reported Complex
13
Li et al Planner Slot 10.7 × 7 × 5 1.4 to 3.5 6 90% Simple
Proposed design Planner Tapered feed 18 × 22 0.6 to 4 4.0 90% Simple
RAZA ET AL.
6 | CONCLUSION
A low profile planner tapered slot antenna for applications
in GPR is proposed. The proposed design consists of
tapered slot design and RL to enhance the lower frequency
of operation and cover wide bandwidth. The microstrip
patch antenna feeding technique is used due to its better
gain profile as compared to the co-planner waveguide feed.
Antenna performance is checked by both simulation and
measurement of antenna prototype for its potential use in
GPR. Planner wideband antennas with stable radiation pat-
terns are suitable for both shallow buried and deeply buried
targets.
Finally, an optimized resistively loaded tapered slot antenna
has a wideband frequency range from 600 MHz to 4 GHz.
Results obtained from sandbox experiment also validate that
the antenna is a suitable candidate for applications in GPR.
O R C ID
Ali Raza https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7247-0712
Wenbin Lin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4282-066X
Yanzheng Chen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8781-2623
Hassan Tariq Chattha https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1017-1009
Abu Bakar Sharif https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7602-0740
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How to cite this article: Raza A, Lin W, Chen Y,
Yanting Z, Chattha HT, Sharif AB. Wideband tapered
slot antenna for applications in ground penetrating
radar. Microw Opt Technol Lett. 2020;1–7. https://doi.
org/10.1002/mop.32338