Wideband and Unidirectional Cavity-Backed Folded Triangular Bowtie Antenna

In this paper, a cavity-backed folded triangular bowtie antenna (FTBA) is proposed and investigated. Comparisons show that it has much smaller fluctuation of input impedance and much larger bandwidth (BW) for stable radiation patterns than cavity-backed ordinary TBA. The proposed antenna is fed by a conventional balun composed of a transition from a microstrip line to a parallel stripline. It achieves an impedance BW of 92.2% for |S11| les -10 dB, stable gain of around 9.5 dBi and unidirectional radiation patterns over the whole operating band. A close examination of the antenna aperture efficiency and the electric field distribution in the aperture provides an explanation for the stable gain across such large frequency band. Comparisons are made against several conventional antennas, including short backfire and microstrip patch antennas, to illustrate the salient features of the proposed antenna. A design guideline is also given for practical applications.