Pro stick is deaf

I have been using a standard dongle on my PiAware system and thought I could get a little more performance out of the Pro Stick so I ordered 2, one for here and another for another location. I was disappointed right away as I went from 20 planes to about 3 with the pro stick. I thought it might have been a lull in traffic so i left it running and over the next few days watched my ratings on Flight aware drop. A day or so ago I added the 1090 filter thinking that I had not set the gain right even though it was 45. When I did that it dropped to almost 0 planes. After playing with the gain with no real change, I decided to go back to my original dongle and WOW, up popped about 20 planes right away.

I am not sure what to try next as I have swapped to the other prostick with the same results and only have good receive with the old dongle.

Any ideas?

Signed Pro Deaf in WPB.

Thanks - Rob

The most common reason so far is that you’ve got a SMA plugged into a RP-SMA and there’s no center pin contact.

lol, yep, just happened to me too.

No problem if you have by mistake purchased RP-SMA Male connector instead of SMA Male connector. Just cut a short piece of core wire of coax, and insert in the center hole of RP-SMA male. The piece of wire will make the missing pin. See photo below.

Here is another image showing difference between SMA and RP-SMA

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7625/26802820521_5fd1bae4c0_o.jpg

OK, so maybe I figured it out, after your posts I double checked the connection. I knew it was right because I am using the stock antenna that comes with it with no jumpers.
But… When I looked at how short the pin was it made me think that it may not have been tightened all the way even though it was ‘finger tight’ so I grabbed on to it and was able to put 3 more turns on it before I hit a ‘hard stop’ and not it seems to be working at least as good as my original dongle.

BTW, I checked and it is NOT cross threaded, and I got the same tightness with both pro sticks and antennas

Thanks for the help