Helium Hotspot Connections

Have a ques­tion about which con­nec­tor or pow­er sup­ply or anten­na cable you should get? Here’s an easy ref­er­ence to use when you’re order­ing parts. I make every effort to keep this updat­ed, but in some cas­es the man­u­fac­tur­ers them­selves are con­tra­dic­to­ry. Check YOUR hotspot to make sure you’re get­ting the right con­nec­tor and PoE injec­tors. Most hotspots are fine with an 802.3af, or “active” PoE injector/splitter com­bo. Check your Hotspot care­ful­ly to make sure you’re get­ting the right sized plug at the split­ter end; USB‑C or a spe­cif­ic size of bar­rel plug 5.5 x 2.1 or 2.5 etc.

As you’ll see, most of the pro­duc­tion min­ers use an RP-SMA con­nec­tion. That means the cable you’ll want to order if you’re installing an after­mar­ket anten­na will be RP-SMA male <–> (usu­al­ly) N‑type male.

Want to dive deep­er, check out some pic­tures, and learn a lit­tle more? Here we go!

RP-SMA stands for Reverse Polar­i­ty SubMinia­ture ver­sion A). The RP series were designed to stop you from con­nect­ing an “unau­tho­rized anten­na” to your gear, whether that’s a Heli­um hotspot or any radio. The FCC’s thought process was along the lines of, “all man­u­fac­tur­ers will have RP-SMA so you can only con­nect them to RP-SMA capa­ble anten­nas, and nobody will sell RP-SMA con­nec­tors to con­sumers.” Pri­or to the inter­net mak­ing all infor­ma­tion and parts avail­able to every­one, that method worked well enough. Now, it’s just con­fus­ing. Onward!

Female RP-SMA con­nec­tors have a female con­tact body (ground) and a male inner pin con­tact (sig­nal). A male RP-SMA con­nec­tor is the oppo­site in both respects — male body (inside threads) with a female inner sleeve contact. 

Here are all four con­nec­tor types. You’ll also see the female referred to as an “jack”, and the male referred to as “plug”. Slight­ly con­fus­ing, right?

Next up: N‑Type Connections

Ok, that’s the con­fus­ing stuff out of the way. Here is what you’ll typ­i­cal­ly see when con­nect­ing to an after­mar­ket anten­na. These are called N‑type con­nec­tions, and are larg­er in size the the SMA series.

Ok, that should clear up most of the ques­tions sur­round­ing what cable con­nec­tion you have, and what you should get. If you have ques­tions about cable loss, check out this post on it, or for quick ref­er­ence, this table: 

CABLE LOSS TABLE

If you’d like to go beyond just con­nect­ing some cables, there are a ton of learn­ing options on this site.

I’ve built cours­es on Heli­um and Heli­umVi­sion, offer trou­bleshoot­ing ses­sions, as well as cus­tom con­sult­ing to indi­vid­ual clients. I dive into strat­e­gy, indi­vid­ual hotspot opti­miza­tion, and help­ing you under­stand where you can pros­per in the Heli­um ecosystem. 

Rock on!