Wideband tapered slot antenna for applications in ground penetrating radar

A planar slotted patch antenna is proposed for ground penetrating radar (GPR). The proposed antenna has a wide bandwidth ranging from 600 MHz to 4 GHz. Tapered slot feeding, curved ground plane, and slot loading are used for a wideband operation, whereas resistive loading is utilized for removal of notch band. Current loops made by slots are bifurcated with the use of 50 Ω resistors. The antenna is designed and optimized to achieve good performance, especially at lower frequencies while keeping the antenna's physical dimension relatively small. The time‐domain analysis of the antenna is performed, and the comparative graph is added after analysis to validate its performance in the impulse‐based radar. Furthermore, a sandbox test is conducted; the experimental results show the significance of the proposed antenna toward GPR application.