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WiFi Antenna pigtail and connectors

A pigtail, is a short cable needed to connect the DIY antenna to a laptop or desktop wireless card and/or access point. A pigtail (sometimes called a laptop adapter cable) is a short length of microwave-friendly coaxial cable with connectors on both ends. It needs to be short because coaxial cable is very lossy at microwave frequencies, and the loss is proportional to the length of the cable.You can make you own (see below), but unless you have experience soldering small connectors to coax, spend you money on a ready-made pigtail. Since the DIY antenna uses a standard N-Female connector, the antenna end of the pigtail will need to be a standard N-Male connector. Look for quality N connectors, low loss silver-plated with gold contacts, not the cheaper silver contacts. If necessary, you can add a PCMCIA or USB adapter to your laptop that will accept the other end of the pigtail. Look for cards/adapters with external antenna connections!

Type N connector (photo) is a threaded RF connector used to join coaxial cables.
The MCX (photo) connector is a connector mainly used with Orinoco, Avaya, Lucent, Proxim, Agere, Dell and other brands. The RPSMA (photo) connector is used with Netgear Access Points, Linksys WET11, PCI cards and others. The RPTNC (photo) connector is typically used with Linksys Access Points and others. The MMCX (photo) connector is used by Senao, Cisco and others. See connector types below for more connectors and information.
Good quality stock and custom pigtails are readily available online. Shorter is better, 6 feet/1.8 meters or less to avoid signal loss. Most pigtails are made from LMR-100 cable that has a loss of 0.4 dB per foot. If using long runs, use coax cable such as LMR-400 rated coax cable.
Coaxial cable-loss calculator (use 2500 MHz for the input frequency, subtract about 1/4 dB loss per connector).

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