Re: Female MC connector?

On Apr 8, 2005, at 2:11 AM, lathrop wrote:

> I am curious as to why you want an mc female. These are crappy 
> connectors. The male tends to break after a few insertions. I have had 
> to replace several to connect to the orinoco cards.

Long story, but basically, I'm trying to do some performance tests of 
Wi-Fi for some transportation research I'm doing. I'm investigating how 
much information two cars can exchange via Wi-Fi as they pass each 
other at high speeds. I already did some tests with some Orinoco cards, 
and it worked great. I just plugged in antennas with MC connectors into 
the cards and ran some tests out in the field (with my help from my 
research group, of course).

The problem is that I want to see how a and g compare to b, but the old 
Orinoco cards I was using only support b. I figured the best thing to 
do is to use a card that has a/b/g all in one; this allows the same 
hardware and software to be used for all tests, providing direct 
comparisons between the Wi-Fi technologies. However, because external 
antennas on 802.11a are illegal, there is no antenna port on the a/b/g 
cards I obtained (Proxim Orinoco ComboCard).

One way to fix this problem is to cut off the ends of the MC antennas I 
was using with the old Orinocos, expose the bare wires, and solder them 
directly to the card's internal antennas. But this would ruin the 
antennas and require more tedious soldering jobs when I want to switch 
between the a and the b/g tests. On the other hand, if I could find a 
pigtail with an MC female connector, and solder the pigtail to the 
card, I would not only save the antennas but have an easy way of 
popping them on and off.

I do have some older CDPD antennas with male TNC connectors, and I 
easily found pigtails that are compatible with them, but I guess this 
wouldn't work, at least not very well, since CDPD antennas are designed 
for 800MHz. That's why I'm trying to use these existing Orinoco 
antennas with the MC connectors.

I'm certainly open to suggestions and alternative solutions that anyone 
might have. Perhaps I just need to ditch these Proxim Orinoco 
ComboCards and find some b/g-only cards with external antenna jacks...

Trevor

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