Miniaturized tapered‐slot ultra‐wideband Vivaldi antenna for ice sounding radar

This paper presents a novel high‐gain, miniaturized, and ultra‐wideband tapered‐slot Vivaldi antenna (TSVA) for ice‐sounding radar applications. To miniaturize the antenna and improve the impedance matching and antenna gain of conventional TSVA, tapered slot edge, circular cavity, rectangular cavity, inner circular patch, and rectangular slit structures are newly designed and introduced. The simulation results show that the size of the designed Vivaldi antenna is reduced by 15% and increases the peak realized gain by up to 5.1 dBi, compared to the conventional Vivaldi antenna. The optimized Vivaldi antenna was fabricated and characterized for its antenna performance. The simulated results are in good agreement with the measured results.