Antenna Design Considerations for Ground Penetrating Radar Landmine Detection

System‐based specifications for better design of ground‐penetrating radar antennas

“…Critically, lossy soil and weaker targets increase the ringdown requirement, and stringent ringdown requirements of 50 dB/ns are possible with wet soils and weak targets. For a detailed discussion, see [16].…”

“…Equation (15) has the given form because the m-th RCS reflection is reflected by ffi ffi ffi ffi ffi ffi ffi σ ant p m times and takes m þ 1 round-trip reflections between antenna and ground. In (15), V rms rx is here defined as the first term in (12) with θ i ¼ 0 ∀ i and G 0 F m ðθÞ ¼ 1, explicitly defined in (16):…”

“…Combining (15), (16), and ( 17) together and collecting constants, we obtain the final expression for an upper bound specification on the antenna RCS σ ant (18):…”

“…As attenuation directly scales with $$\mathrm{exp}(\mathrm{sec}\,\theta )$$ detection in an environment with high attenuation is equivalent to either having a narrower antenna beampattern than designed or to the detection of a target with further limited view angle reflectivity. Third, a higher soil attenuation will directly increase the stringent requirements on the impulse ringdown due to weaker target reflections, as explored in [16]. As a portion of this ringdown is attributable to transmit‐receive antenna sidelobes or main lobe overlap, a higher soil attenuation places an emphasis on high directionality of antennas.…”

“…Lestari [15] performs an analysis on adaptive wire dipoles and bowtie antenna input impedance to reconfigure the antenna for different ground environments and targets. Daniels [16] focuses an in‐depth study on a monostatic pair's impulse response in terms of late‐time ringing and clutter reduction for landmine targets in lossy soils and describes the impact of a slow ringdown on the system's performance. Schantz [17] provides additional generalised time domain analysis on ultrawideband antennas used as radiators given different input pulses including a Gaussian signal.…”