Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for electronics and electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Up until today i've ezperimented with antennas by basically taping the coax endpoint to my breadboards and it's been working "so so" and I'm looking for a PCB connector for my N Connector cable.
Any ideas what to get and how you connect those? Anything special to consider?
(source)
Just to follow up on the comments. Most people don't mount a big N connector on a PCB edge because it would flex the PCB too much. Inside an enclosure you could mount the the N on a panel then cable over to the PCB. An edge mount PCB SMA connector is a good choice, just make sure the gap matches the PCB thickness that you are using.
As mentioned by several people in the comments SMA is usually a preferred option. They have very high frequency responses to 18GHz (which matches Type-N) and sometimes higher and you can buy good cables for them. Typical curves for a new clean Type N connector with a perfect load (VSWR=1.0) give limits of ≈5000 W at 20 MHz and ≈500 W at 2 GHz. Compared to SMA which is about 500W @ 100Mhz and 170W at 1GHz.
I use them so often I put N-SMA adapters on my equipment and use all SMA cables.
Also for "launching" or tying into a an area of a PCB I use simi-rigid SMA coax. This is basically a "pipe" where the outside is copper is hard and good for soldering down to the PCB ground plane in either a large area or a few spots. The center conductor is kept short as possible to get to the test point. This provides strain relief and a very few reflections across the band to about 6Ghz, sometimes higher if you're careful.
