Designing a dispersionless UWB channel with two identical antennas

The development of UWB communications systems has led to intense research on antennas that can provide instantaneous coverage to the UWB spectral from 3.1 - 10.6 GHz (Z.N. Chen et al., 2004). Reciprocity dictates that the impulse response of an antenna on transmit is the derivative of the impulse response on receive. UWB radio systems are further complicated by the fact that the impulse response is a function of the direction arrival. All of these items combine to force us to consider the impulse response of the antenna when modeling the UWB communications channel. Many researchers have explored the problem of developing antennas for UWB communications by adapting existing antennas that have been developed for other purposes. The two primary thrusts have been to take planar and low profile antennas and adapt them to be more wideband, or to take known wideband radiators like bowtie antennas or TEM horns and adapt them to make them more compact (Z.N. Chen et al., 2004). Both of these strategies have produced excellent results, but suffer from the limitations inherent in their starting points. In this paper, we hypothesize a concept for an UWB antenna, and then discuss ways of achieving the particular impulse response in question.