A super wideband Chebyshev tapered antipodal Vivaldi antenna

A novel approach of improving the impedance matching at lower frequencies of antipodal Vivaldi antenna by Chebyshev tapering is presented in this work. The conventional antipodal Vivaldi antennas are modified by Chebyshev tapered loading which yields an extremely large impedance bandwidth from 1 GHz to 35 GHz, with percentage bandwidth of 189%. The antenna has an overall dimension of 100 mm × 100 mm. The proposed structure shows peak gain of 6.8 dBi and has fairly stable radiation pattern throughout its operating bandwidth. A fabricated prototype is developed and measured characteristics are in good agreement with simulated results.