Broadband antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) for radio over fiber (ROF) applications is presented. Comprehensive analysis based on several full wave simulations is performed to finalize a compact AVA design having physical dimension of 32 × 30 mm2. The measured results demonstrated that proposed antenna can be operated from 14.8 to 67 GHz band showing 128% fractional bandwidth. The designed antenna presents pulse fidelity factor (PFF) value equal to 0.95 for the transmission of ultrashort time duration pulses having full‐width‐half‐maximum (FWHM) of 7.6 ps. An experimental ROF measurement setup is developed with our proposed AVAs and light‐wave component analyzer (LCA) operating over 15–40 GHz. For ROF measurements, PFF value equal to 0.94 is confirmed. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:1441–1446, 2017