Abstract: An effective method is proposed for the design of the transient back-cavity bowtie antenna for ground-penetrating radar(GPR)applications, which is based on the demand that the maximum energy of the transient signal ought to be emitted downward to the earth in GPR. In the process of the design the frequency band of the antenna is first determined by analyzing the frequency spectrum of the transient pulse to be radiated, and then the structure sizes of both the antenna and back cavity can hereby be found easily with the presented method. The proposed method for the antenna design, having great facility in the engineering applications, has been validated by experiments and numerical simulation results. Otherwise, a GPR system, based on such-designed antenna with good performance in the buriedobject detections, was developed with success.