A New Ground Penetrating Radar Antenna Design - The Horn-Fed Bowtie (HFB)

AMTA'97 Symposium Proceedings, pp.67-74, Oct. 1997

Chi-Chih Chen

The Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory
1320 Kinnear Road, Columbus, Ohio 43212
(TEL) (614) 292-3403, (FAX) (614) 292-7297

Abstract

Bowtie dipole antennas have been widely used for surface-based ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications. This type of GPR antennas share common problems such as low directivity, antenna ringing, unstable characteristic impedance, RFI and large size. Special treatments have been used to improve their performance. Resistive terminations have been used to reduce the antenna ringing at the price of efficiency. Some use reflectors to increase directivity at the price of bandwidth and the risk of cavity ringing excitation. Absorbing material is also used to shield RFI with increased size and weight. Some people use horn antennas because of better gain. However, they are limited to high frequency applications where their size are still reasonable to handle. This means they can only do shallow target measurements. Horn antenna approach also faces the strong reflection arising at the air-ground interface. A new type of GPR antenna design presented in this paper has been developed to overcome the above difficulties.

Keywords: Ground Penetrating Radar, Ordnance, Design, Antenna Measurements

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