Wideband compact dipole antenna for microwave imaging applications

In this study, the authors present a novel dipole antenna for microwave imaging (MWI) applications. Differentfrom the previous works, the designed dipole is compact while having a wide-impedance bandwidth of 1-4.2 GHzalong with a moderate gain. In particular, the largest dimension of the antenna is 6 cm, which is 0.2 wavelength at thevery lower end of the operating frequency bandwidth. Furthermore, the resultant design has a cross-polarisation level<20 dB. Important characteristics of the proposed design are given with the simulations through analysis system highfrequencystructure simulator. Obtained simulation results are also shown to be consistent with the measurements. Inaddition to measuring fundamental parameters of the designed dipole, they also test the proposed antenna in acircular MWI system. In this context, several dielectric scatterers are measured in a circular scanner and obtainedscattered field measurements are supplied to the well-known contrast source inversion method. Imaging results showthat the proposed antenna is quite suitable for MWI applications.