For no reason, I feel like telling you all a little about tiny microwave connectors.
okay so RF. if you want to move radio frequency signals from place to place you need a waveguide. waveguides are pipes that radio signals bounce around in, and they can be hard, or flexible.
the flexible waveguides we all know and love are coaxial cable, which you know from ten years ago, the last time you dicked with the antenna / aerial on a television. 
here's coax. a tube made of metal, an insulator, and a rod made of metal. it's all like that, but it comes in a ton of sizes.
the cable you're used to from your television - or RCA cables, if you have decent ones - is RG59/U. it's about 1/4"? somewhere around there. It's at the smaller end of the range. The size affects frequency and power rating.
i need to be /crystal/ clear about this: i told you coax comes in different sizes. i need you to understand that there are no bounds on this statement.
after a certain point, the flexibility tends to become both unnecessary and counterproductive, so we switch to "hardline." this is 6-inch hardline. that's small, for hardline.
I should note that "waveguide" also refers to these, as well as other hollow waveguides without center conductors. I frankly have no idea why. RF nerds have tried to explain it to me but a rule about RF is that nobody really gets it all the way anyway.
in fact, i've had all of this stuff explained to me a few different ways and I still don't understand it very well. I've been told that, at least conceptually, these are really no different than fiber optics except the frequencies are much much lower.
anyway all this is beside the point, i wanted to show you the other end of the spectrum (ha ha). see the coax you use for TV signals is really very big so by the 60s they needed smaller stuff. so we got, for instance, RG-174
The connectors used on the larger coaxes (coacies?) are pretty meaty. They look like you'd expect for "Radio Shit." Here are PL259 and N, which each measure something like 3/4" in diameter and were super common for decades.
You CAN put one of those on RG-174, amusingly, and I've seen that quite a bit in fact, but typically you wouldn't want to. So in the 60s we got SMA.
These are pretty small! If you had the right kind of wifi device in the mid 2000s you might have seen them in use. They're about 1/4" but still big enough to get a decent grip on. I like SMA.
For a size comparison, these are BNC to SMA adapter cables.
Anyway the reason I brought all this up was mostly so I could explain that hardline also comes in SMA, and it's kind of unsettling.
So you'd have a piece of gear that needs 10 RF connections, and instead of a mess of cables, you'd have this interlinking matrix of tiny precision-bent metal pipes with no flexibility.
It's hard to find any pictures of this sort of thing unless you know a specific model to look up; I don't, so apologies. however, in the process of trying to find this, I did find the most powerfully cursed connector in existence.
Please enjoy: It.
This is powerfully, intensely unholy. This is straight out of hell. Diablo invented this.
Ah, but to cleanse our palates, here's an actual picture of tiny hardline in use.
Now, of course, SMA is from the 60s so naturally things couldn't stop there. It's still pretty big as things go. So within the 60s, we got SMB. Third pic is an SMA->SMB adapter; misleading because the genders don't match but still, it's considerably smaller.
In the 80s we got MMC, which was smaller than SMB; I can't find good pictures of it and it's hard to tell the diff anyway.
Then in the 90s, MMCX, a connector so small that every adapter for it looks EXTREMELY COMICAL. Don't talk to me or my EXTREMELY SMALL SON
finally, to complete this absurd timeline, we got hirose connectors. These are universally used for everything wireless in laptops (wifi, bt, gps) and are virtually flat, they just push on. they are awful, but work remarkably well.
i guess a lot of what makes these a little upsetting is that somewhere in your brain you probably feel like "c'mon, at that point do you even need coax, does it *really* matter" and yes, it does,
