**Abstract**

Water is the human vital requirement for life; in these days, decreasing of the fresh water increases the importance of the aquifer water. However, Upper Egypt is higher than north Egypt, so the water map continually changes daily, and the aquifer water is deeper than 10 m. The ground penetrating radar (GPR) system is used for underground water detection. GPR is a promising technology to detect and identify aquifer water or nonmetallic mines. One of the most serious components for the performance of GPR is the antenna system. The technology of the remote sensing and radar is rapidly developing, and it has led to the ultra-wideband electronic systems. All of these factors, such as miniaturized, low cost, possible compromise solution between depth and resolution, scanning in real time, easy to interpret, and decreased the false alarm, are important in designing the ground penetrating system. The electrical properties of the sand and fresh water layers are investigated using laboratory measurement and EM simulation. Different types of antenna may be used in GPR to operate over a frequency range for different penetration depth. Frequency-modulated continuous wave is also used for GPR and for through-the-wall applications. However, most of these kinds of antennas are limited by their large volume for certain applications. Therefore, a compact Vivaldi antenna with EBG and a compact planar printed quasi-Yagi antenna with meandered ground plane are designed to fulfill all above requirement.

**Keywords:** high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS), Yagi antenna, Vivaldi antenna, ultra-wideband (UWB), ground-penetrating radar (GPR), water detection, printed antenna, reflection coefficient, phase
