Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the questions you're faced with when you start your amateur journey is around connectors. You quickly discover that every piece of equipment with an RF socket has a different one fit for purpose for that particular device. That purpose includes the frequency range of the device, but also things like water ingress, number of mating cycles, power levels, size, cost and more. As an aside, the number of mating cycles, how often you connect and disconnect something is determined by several factors, including the type of connection, manufacturing precision and the thickness of the plating. That said, even a so-called low cycle count connector, like say an SMA connector lasting 500 cycles will work just fine for the next 40 years if you only connect it once a month. Back to variety. My PlutoSDR has SMA connectors on it as do my band pass filters, my handheld and one RTL-SDR dongle. The other dongle uses MCX. Both my antenna analyser and UHF antenna have an N-type connector whi