Ultra-wideband parabolic bicone antenna for ground penetrating radar

Antenna design for ground penetrating radar (GPR) is very complex and depends on specific application. In typical civil engineering GPR applications, the antennas need to be low cost, small size, compact and simple while operating in close vicinity to real ground and in wide frequency band. In this paper we propose an ultra-wideband parabolic bicone antenna. Except for its compactness and small size, the bicone antenna design parameters and the given procedure can be used for a specific GPR application. The proposed antenna achieves VSWR > 2 in ultra-wideband from 0.67 - 4.3 GHz with the total height of 11.8 cm. Time domain response of the proposed antenna shows a negligible excitation signal distortion in the direction of maximum radiation. Also, very good VSWR is obtained when the antenna is very close to the typical real ground found in civil engineering GPR applications.