Small planar broadside radiation leaky wave antenna design

The wireless communication systems in the last decade have an explosive growth. Antennas play an important part of the rapid growth of wireless communication systems. With this growth, great demands have come for antennas with low cost, low profile, light weight, easy fabrication, and suitability for mass production in order to support every aspect of communication systems. Microstrip antenna is one of the most popular choices for antenna design with above features. However, high radiation efficiency microstrip antenna is difficult to design due to its resonance phenomenon. Microstrip leaky wave antenna (LWA), becomes the good candidate to overcome this difficulty. In this paper a novel, size efficient antenna design, providing broadside radiation pattern has been presented. The measured results show a good agreement with the preliminary design and confirm the design concepts.