Rigorous TE solution to the dielectric wedge antenna fed by a slab waveguide

A rigorous TE solution to the dielectric wedge antenna fed by a slab waveguide of the same material is presented. The method of solution involves modeling the wedge as a sequence of step discontinuities and uses an iterative procedure to track forward and backward partial wave fields, expressed as modal ex-., pansions, to obtain the rigorous field solution. Radiation patterns of directive gain are presented. All patterns smoothly decrease from a maximum in the endfire direction and exhibit extremely low side lobe levels. Longer length wedges or smaller dielectric constant materials are shown to produce higher directivity and smaller half-power beamwidths. For slender, gradually tapered wedges, the reflection coefficient of the guided (surface) wave at the input to the wedge is very small indicating a low VSWR for tapered dielectric antennas and there appears to be no gain limitation with antenna length for these antennas.