Landmines are buried and forgotten, so often that an estimated total of 110 million landmines are buried in over 60 countries around the world. Statistics show that hidden and forgotten landmines kill or injure approximately 70 people each day, resulting in over 25,000 deaths or injuries per year. Unfortunately, there is little international effort to detect and clear the landmines due to shortage of funding. Before they can be removed, they must be located and ultrawideband (UWB) ground-penetrating-radar (GPR) technology is ideal for finding the location of these deadly devices.

Newer landmines are built without metal, rendering conventional metal detectors useless for locating these landmines. But several methods can be used for surveying buried landmines, including the use of nuclear quadrupole resonance, electromagnetic (EM) induction spectroscopy, thermal neutron activation, infrared imaging, biological detection, and UWB GPR systems. GPR has been contributed by microwave engineers for this humanitarian purpose, although the technology also has many other commercial applications. A GPR system works by transmitting EM pulses into the ground and detecting the backscattered EM waves that indicate changes in permittivity, permeability, and conductivity in the ground.¹ If interpreted correctly, the received signals can be used to indicate the presence of a landmine beneath the surface.

One of the most critical subsystems in a GPR system is the antenna. Because of its use of short EM pulses, a GPR system must process an extremely wide bandwidth. The antenna must provide consistent performance over an UWB frequency range. But in contrast to antennas used for UWB wireless communications, antennas for GPR systems must have the following characteristics:

1. Efficient coupling of EM waves into the ground, i.e., good impedance matching at the antenna/ground interface;
2. Short ringing times (ringing occurs due to reflection within the antenna as well as the reflections at the antenna/ground interface, and these reflections can mask target return signals);
3. High power-handling capability so that the EM waves can achieve adequate ground penetration and reach a target with sufficient amplitude to generate a receivable return signal;
4. Adequate bandwidth to benefit from both larger penetration depth of low-frequency signals, as well as the high range resolution of higher-frequency signals;
5. Provide nondispersive propagation, radiating all frequencies at the same speed (or as a linear function of frequency) and have a constant phase center;
6. Have impedance that is well matched across the entire bandwidth in the actual operating setup where the antenna is near to the ground;
7. Provide stable performance for different ground properties and at different elevation levels;
8. Provide high directivity, concentrating EM energy into a narrow solid angle into the ground;
9. Provide an antenna pattern that does not change significantly over the operating bandwidth;
10. Exhibit constant polarization over the operating bandwidth;
11. Provide weak coupling between the transmit and receive antennas in a bistatic configuration;
12. Be compact enough to occupy a reasonably small volume; and
13. Be inexpensive to produce.

Element-based antennas, such as biconical and printed dipole antennas, and frequency-independent antennas, such as spiral, Vivaldi, and log-periodic antennas, can only meet some of these requirements. While a TEM horn antenna can meet most of the requirements,^2-12 some modifications must be made to satisfy the remaining requirements.

The medium into which the antenna must transmit—the ground—is generally lossy, inhomogeneous, sometimes anistropic, and exhibits frequency-dependent attenuation. Some media with high resistivity, such as gravel, sand, dry rock, and fresh water, present low signal attenuation and are relatively easy to probe. Media with low resistivity, such as clay soil, ground with conductive ore and minerals, and saltwater, present large signal attenuation, making it difficult for EM waves to penetrate. The average soil has a relative permittivity, e_r, of 2 to 9 and attenuation factor, e, of 5 to 10 dB/m.¹³

In order to improve the impedance match at the antenna/ ground interface, a dielectric with relative permittivity, e_r, that is close to the ground medium is chosen for the design of the TEM horn antenna. At the same time, establishing a good impedance match between the antenna and the ground also reduces antenna coupling between the transmitter and the receiver and decreases the physical dimensions of the antenna. (The length of a basic TEM horn antenna is typically three times the pulse duration multiplied by c, the speed of light.)

The plates of the horn antenna can be linearly tapered or exponentially tapered. Linearly tapered plates are easier to construct. Exponentially tapered plates have the advantage of lower internal reflection and larger bandwidth. If the plates of the antenna are considered to be a transmission line, then the parameters that determine the impedance at a point along the antenna are the plate width and the spacing between the plates. Generally, the further apart the plates are, the greater the impedance will be. Thus, it is possible to gradually increase the impedance of the antenna from around 50 ohms at the feed point to the wave impedance of the propagation medium (377 ohms for air and lower impedances for other media depending on their dielectric constants) at the aperture to match both the input and output impedances and hence reduce unwanted reflection at these two points. However, there are finite reflections along the antenna plate as its separation distance changes. The idea here is to vary the plate width and separation such that these internal reflections are minimal. Huang et al. have shown that the optimum performance can be achieved with a nonlinear impedance profile from feed point to the TEM horn aperture which means that the resulting antenna plate width would also be nonlinear.¹¹

A wedge-shaped dielectric material was used (as opposed to pyramid-shaped dielectric) in the design of the TEM horn antenna. Apart from the electrical advantages described above, it also serves as substrate to hold the plates at the desired separation. The design steps for the TEM horn antenna can be summarized as follows:

1. Specify the maximum input reflection in the passband as well as the lowerfrequency limit:
|R(0)|_max = the maximum input reflection in the passband and f_min = the lower-frequency limit of the passband

2. Specify the characteristic impedance of the antenna at the feed point and at the aperture, where
Z₀(0) = the characteristic impedance at the feed point and
Z,₀(d) = the characteristic impedance at the aperture.

3. Calculate parameter B in Eq. 1

Parameter B will be used to determine the exponential taper in the antenna plates. Larger values of B will result in a greater curve i the taper and lower reflection at the input. While this is good, as will be seen in the next step, larger values of B result in longer antennas 4. Calculate the length of the antenna, d, using Eqs. 2 and 3.

where
d = the length of the antenna and
v = the velocity of the EM wave in the dielectric medium filling the void between the antenna plates. It is clear from these equations that having a lower minimum frequency, fmin, will result in a longer antenna. In addition, a larger value of B will increase the length of the antenna.

5. Calculate the optimum characteristic impedance profile of the antenna to minimize internal reflections, as shown by Eq. 4.¹⁴

where
Z₀(z) = the characteristic impedance of the antenna at position z and parameter G(B, ?) is given by Eq. 5.

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