Enhanced Surface Wave Propagation With a Highly Inductive Metasurface

This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a metasurface for surface wave propagation enhancement. Our work performed in L-band, exploits fully metallic high-impedance surface, which allows limiting the device height to λ/30 while ensuring an enhancement of the electric field magnitude by over 7.2 dB at the edge of the metasurface. When illuminated by a monopole antenna, an increase of the antenna gain at grazing angle of 5 dB is achieved. The measured results show good agreement with simulations, validating the effectiveness of the proposed design. This work is a further step towards improving HF-band coastal radars using fully metallic and low-profile structures.