Abstract
Broadband antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) for radio over fiber (ROF) applications is presented. Comprehensive analysis based on several full wave simulations is performed to finalize a compact AVA design having physical dimension of 32 3 30 mm(2). The measured results demonstrated that proposed antenna can be operated from 14.8 to 67 GHz band showing 128% fractional bandwidth. The designed antenna presents pulse fidelity factor (PFF) value equal to 0.95 for the transmission of ultrashort time duration pulses having full-width-halfmaximum (FWHM) of 7.6 ps. An experimental ROF measurement setup is developed with our proposed AVAs and light-wave component analyzer (LCA) operating over 15-40 GHz. For ROF measurements, PFF value equal to 0.94 is confirmed. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.