Leaky-Wave Antenna with Alternately Loaded Complementary Radiation Elements

In this letter, we compare the scanning beams of two leaky-wave antennas (LWAs), respectively, loaded with capacitive and inductive radiation elements, which have not been fully discussed in previous publications. It is pointed out that an LWA with only one type of radiation element suffers from a significant gain fluctuation over its beam-scanning band. To remedy this problem, we propose an LWA alternately loaded with inductive and capacitive elements along the host transmission line. The proposed LWA is able to steer its beam continuously from backward to forward with constant gain. A microstrip-based LWA is designed on the basis of the proposed method, and the measurement of its fabricated prototype demonstrates and confirms the desired results. This design method can widely be used to obtain LWAs with constant gain based on a variety of TLs.