How to and tips from RFShop blog

It can be quite confusing to specify coaxial connectors particularly when they can be “reverse polarity”  or “reverse gender”. In the good old days, before some bright spark decided to introduce RP types there were just two types of SMA and other similar connectors. The plug had a male pin and the jack had a female pin. Too easy. The reverse SMA plug, RP-SMA plug,  instead, has a female pin (4th pic down) and the reverse SMA jack has a male pin (3rd pic down). Unfortunately there seems to be an increasing tendency to refer to the RP-SMA plug as “RP-SMA male”. We use the term RP-SMA plug female pin , because, from what we know of sex, there are no male elements at all in RP-SMA plugs.