![]() ![]() You have the radio in the house with an antenna attached, you go to the car, remove the portable antenna and connect the car antenna, that's one cycle. For arguments sake, the radio is never dropped or the connector damaged in any way other than removing/installing antennas and the connectors wear out at 500 cycles (remove and replace the antenna equals 1 cycle). so to speak.Īs a side note, anybody know a way to get a new BNC jack on a pro668 without having to get it sent off somewhere for all eternity? like a BNC to BNC twist-on UNIDEN-type solution that doesn't end up being 5 inches taller than the housing? The BNC jacks on PRO-668's are not to be regarded as, nor played with, as if it were an appendage one, as a young boy, discovered has more than one function. the beauty with the adapters being, quick switch, quick fix. the amount of antenna switching i have done.well let's say most would call it excessive, i call it testing, but nonetheless, i figure has far exceeded the industry standard testing protocols for mating cycles for this type of purpose, and i have had basically no issues worth mentioning nor fixing. i dunno how well the SMAs would hold up under my "care" but i know that the BNCs do just dandy. Pretty simple, right?! Just make sure to match the antenna frequency with the your board.Īnd just in case if you happen to find the old and new mixing, we sell a SMA male to RP-SMA male and a RP-SMA female to RP-SMA male connector that will most combinations of antenna and connector to be mated.As the voice of experience, i feel compelled to add little to nothing on the SMA front, but would like to highly recommend the UNIDEN BNC jacks and the SMA to BNC adapters. If you have a RP-SMA board or module, you need a RP-SMA antenna and so forth for SMA. Really, you can ignore the gender descriptor. If the board does not have a u.FL connector to attach an external antenna, SparkFun RF boards and antennas will use a combination of the old (SMA) and new (RP-SMA):Ĭellular and GPS (900/1700/1800MHz and 1.57542GHz respectively) generally use the old convention: SMA male for the antennas and SMA female for the modules.Īnything 2.4GHz (Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, and Nordic) generally use the new convention: RP-SMA male on the antennas and RP-SMA female on the modules. The next two photos are considered reversed polarized (RP-SMA). The RP (reverse polarity) is named after its “thread gender” and has an opposite-gender pin. The only thing that changed with the Part 15 compliance was the center pin, thus reversing the polarity of the connection and forming a “new” standard the reversed polarized SMA (RP-SMA). All of our boards are either SMA female or RP-SMA male. All of our antennas are either SMA male or RP-SMA female. There is one consistency however all antennas, cables or anything was being attached to a potential stationary object used an outer nut or inner thread design and all stationary devices used the outer thread design. If all antennas are female, there is no way to damage the center connector. The FCC gender change was instituted to prevent home users from damaging RF equipment (think home WiFi) when screwing on an antenna. Really annoying for those of us who need to mate an antenna to an RF device. All this means is that all the SMA RF connectors are changing gender (center pin). The above two connectors were designed to be used together, but there was a problem with this configuration and the FCC started moving towards Part 15 compliance. The original SMA design called for two compliant connectors: But from what I have found there was an original “old” design for SMA connectors. There are 4 different types of SMA connectors using a combination of gender, which refers to the center pin and polarity, which refers to….uh, this is where it gets confusing. Therefore, we need different antennas to match the specific gender or polarity of the RF connections. However, some of these boards use different genders and polarities of the SMA connector. SparkFun uses SMA-type connectors on a few boards that need a 50 Ohm impedance connection to an external antenna ( GPS, Bluetooth, cellular, Nordic, and XBee).
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