Improvements of dipole, helix, spiral, microstrip patch and aperture antennas with ground planes by using corrugated soft surfaces

The paper presents a study of some elementary antennas, such as a dipole, a waveguide aperture, a microstrip patch, a spiral and a helix, when they are mounted on a ground plane with circular corrugations acting as a soft surface. The results of both experiments and calculations are described. The latter have been done either by the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD) or by the moment method (MM), and are in good agreement with the measurements. It is found that the corrugated soft ground plane makes the radiation patterns of all the antennas more rotationally symmetric with lower sidelobe levels and lower crosspolarisation when compared to using a smooth conducting ground plane.