Gain Improvement of a Microstrip Composite Right/Left-Handed Leaky Wave Antenna Using Symmetrical Unit Cells with Short Stubs

Shin-ichiro MATSUZAWA  Kazuo SATO  Atushi SANADA  Hiroshi KUBO 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications  Vol.E90-B  No.6  pp.1559-1561
Publication Date: 2007/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Antennas and Propagation
Keyword: 
metamaterials,  composite right/left-handed transmission lines,  leaky wave antennas,  beam scan, 

Full Text: PDF(446.6KB)

Summary: 
In order to improve the antenna gain, a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave (LW) antenna composed of symmetrical unit cells with short stubs terminated by vertical vias is designed. The use of symmetrical unit cells suppresses the cross-polarization of radiation to less than 23 dB. By comparing the measured radiation characteristics to that of a conventional CRLH LW antenna without short stub in the X-band, it is shown that the presented CRLH LW antenna with 51 unit cells offers a narrower beam and the antenna gain improves 4.1, 2.2 and 3.1 dB in the backward, broadside and forward directions of radiation, respectively.