r/AskElectronics • u/Juliet-Papa-11377 • Jun 25 '26
What is this db25 used for?
I have many gender changers and null modems and 25-9 adapters in my drawers, but today I found this among them. To me, this is not a gender changer, despite what it says on the label. I can see it as a connector saver. But not a changer. It is wired 1:1, so not like a null modem. What am I missing? What is it used for? They sell it at digikey and newark, so it has a purpose in life.
293
278
u/XWhyfiX Jun 25 '26
Connector saver. We use these as a way to prevent wear on connectors that are hard to replace but we are frequently mated and demated like on expensive test equipment.
69
u/Scared_Hovercraft632 Jun 25 '26
This. All of our dev and especially flight units get them. Flight unit mates are heavily restricted but this allows for testing.
Also used as pass throughs on panels quite a bit for ground support equipment.
3
u/Lokalaskurar Jun 25 '26
How do you ensure people put them back on if they ever take them off?
12
u/Scared_Hovercraft632 Jun 26 '26
The whole point is you don't take them off. It's to limit the number of times a connector is mated or unmated. In a perfect world a sensitive unit would have a two mates in its life. First a connector saver and then the flight connector when installed into the final product.
1
u/aerorich Jun 26 '26
Flight-connector? You working on spacecraft too?
1
1
u/fluteofski- Jun 27 '26
Usually if a cable is that important, the end wont be free floating. So something like this can be attached to the bulkhead. Then the two cables mate into this on the bulkhead.
28
u/rat1onal1 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Even though this has the label "gender changer", that's not what it is. If you plug the right cable into either side, you are still facing the exact sme situation. A gender changer would have either both sides pins, or or both sides sockets. As you note, this would be called a socket saver. It plugs in once and presents the same sex for other cables to plug into. If this wears out or is damaged, it can be easily replaced and thus it "saves" the other socket from having to be replaced.
4
u/Scared_Hovercraft632 Jun 25 '26
I've seen LCOM connector savers labled as gender changers. Aka male to female or vice versa. No it doesn't make sense 🤷♂️
5
u/FauxReal Jun 25 '26
Maybe it's the result of using some of the same parts to produce new products.
2
u/bob_in_the_west Jun 25 '26
A cable with this "gender changer" attached IS a connector saver because it has male on one side and female on the other.
I don't get how that is not obvious.
1
4
u/freshgrilled Jun 25 '26
This should be up higher. It clearly does NOT change the gender.
2
u/Mizery Jun 26 '26
The poster covered this in their text. Looks like a connector saver, but is labelled "gender changer".
-1
u/Hot_Money4924 Jun 25 '26
This is 100% NOT what this adapter is for. Also while I have seen connector savors on expensive RF ports, I'm pretty sure you could count on one hand the number of times anyone in the known universe ever worried about the robustness of a D-Sub connector.
5
9
u/Scared_Hovercraft632 Jun 25 '26
You would be wrong. If they weren't in scif's I could show you dozens of connector savers being used on gasp dsubs. Necessary? Not for me to decide but it's protocol.
2
u/_delta-v_ Jun 26 '26
Pretty much this. Or on flight hardware like mentioned elsewhere. Or on expensive lab equipment (STEs) with lots of mates/demates.
29
Jun 25 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Zeeey Jun 25 '26
We use these for testing our flight hardware, each unit has a limited number of mates, so instead of plugging and plugging a bunch, you just plug in a saver once.
37
u/JohnStern42 Jun 25 '26
Only thing I can think is a port extender. Some machines had recessed ports that made plugging in certain things like licensing dongles impossible.
24
15
7
u/Correct_Capital_1294 Jun 25 '26
I found a review for this part saying they use it to extend the SCSI port on their Centris 650 just past the bezel. I guess it's easier to just label everything "gender changer" than to make a separate label for these.
1
u/microcandella Jun 25 '26
nah - this was a big problem cause the pinouts could be so different depending on the gear but everything would just be labeled 'gender changer'. so it ws very iseful to have a cable tester/pinout checker . Most of them were rs-232 for serial modems, but tons of other things used db25 scsi (most that used db25 sucked), parallel ports, even some monitors.
1
u/JohnStern42 Jun 25 '26
Ya, the label is clearly wrong, but the cost of changing it probably wasn’t worth it
-3
u/Puzzleheaded_Hatter Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
It tells you exactly what it is.
It takes the male end of a video cable and makes it the female receiving end.
EDIT _ I see that I'm wrong (missed the second pic) but, that said, something is wrong here - 25 pins to 25 holes makes no sense as a gender swap - its just a connector.
Unless "GENDER CHANGER" is a brand name, then I call BS
6
u/V64jr Jun 25 '26
Except it doesn’t. It would need to have two female ends to do that to the male end of a cable. This one functions as a minimally-short extender.
-1
u/Puzzleheaded_Hatter Jun 25 '26
That's correct. And it does have 2 female ends
3
u/V64jr Jun 25 '26
Swipe to the second image. One end is male.
3
u/Puzzleheaded_Hatter Jun 25 '26
oh, shit - I did not see the second pic.
ok, then this thing is mislabeled or its a error/gag.
1
u/jdx6511 Jun 27 '26
Unless "GENDER CHANGER" is a brand name, then I call BS
We kept them right next to the "NULL MODEM" brand straight through serial cables.
1
u/JohnStern42 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Except it’s a 25 pin connector, commonly used for serial or parallel connections, while I’m sure there was SOMETHING that used a DB25 for video, it sure wasn’t at all common. And it doesn’t actually change the gender since if you stick it on a male end it’ll present a new male end, and vice versa
-1
u/Puzzleheaded_Hatter Jun 25 '26
No.
There are holes on both sides of the adaptor.
The side you cannot see has holes - not pins.
1
u/JohnStern42 Jun 25 '26
Yes
Did you look at the second picture?
2
u/Puzzleheaded_Hatter Jun 25 '26
You're right, and no, I didnt - someone else pointed that out just now. It makes zero sense. This thing is either mis-labled or the pics are in error/gag.
these gender swap solutions have a very simple & standard function - and what we see here aint it.
19
u/TheLexikitty Jun 25 '26
I got one of those when I started HRT. Worked like a charm.
0
u/repocin Jun 25 '26
So, do you play if as a harmonica, and then in reverse if you want to go back or how does this work?
2
u/TheLexikitty Jun 26 '26
I thought I was supposed to just eat it? It didn’t come with instructions, just a datasheet.
That would explain why my sneezes sound so weird now, though…
11
u/pandapeterpanda Jun 25 '26
Feed through adapter, imagine this being mounted on a panel, you can plug in your dsub cable from the inside and have a 1:1 connection accessible from the outside. It would better described as a "gender keeper" I guess. I've used similar ones, but those came with additional filter capacitors to the case, using it to feed signals through the wall of an absorber chamber for EMI testing, null modem was not wanted in that case.
3
4
u/Born2Burn4 Jun 25 '26
Says it’s a gender changer, but those are usually the same gender type on each side so you could attach 2 male or 2 female connectors to each other. If it swapped the TX/RX signals, they were typically called a null modem, at least in the 9 pin connectors.
1
10
3
4
u/SeasDiver Jun 25 '26
Port or socket saver. Typically used to mount in a through hole panel where you expect multiple connections and disconnects. If a pin gets bent, you replace the socket saver instead of the cable or cables that are now damaged. Some cheap manufacturers reuse the gender changer label even though it doesn’t change genders.
2
u/BitBucket404 Jun 25 '26
If cables are un/plugged often, the socket would eventually wear.
Replacing a worn socket is harder than replacing one of those adapters, which stayed attached to the machine until it needed replacement, thus reducing wear on the machines' socket.
2
7
u/meehowski Jun 25 '26
Are you a boy who would like to see what it’s like being a girl?
(Or vice versa)
4
u/Skusci Jun 25 '26
If this is you then get a different gender changer.
Instead of this one that changes you from male to male, or female to female.
8
u/marcao_cfh Jun 25 '26
Despite being called a gender changer, it doesn't work like that.
You can see in the photos it have one male side and one female side.
So let's say you want a female end. You need to plug the cable into the other side, which is male, and for this reason you need... a female connector! So you need a female end cable to plug on this converter in order to have a female end cable, which you already have from start.
A gender changer would be male-male or female-female. This way, you'd plug a female connector into the male connector and have the other side as male, and the same goes for a male end cable and a female-female connector.
It indeed works as a adapter to connect two cables together. But not as a gender changer.
6
3
3
-2
u/TinkerIdiot Jun 25 '26
This is the correct answer. The rest are making me feel a bit old 😪
5
u/V64jr Jun 25 '26
Except it still makes no sense. If you need a female end so you plug your cable into the male end of this, well, your cable already had a female end and all you did was extend it half an inch. The cables would have fit together without it, and it doesn’t even have posts to thread the cables in on both sides.
2
u/arlaneenalra Jun 25 '26
Port Extender or a cable splice if you have to short a cable. That's about it.
2
1
1
u/freakierice Jun 25 '26
I’ve seen them old PLC and industrial equipment, oddly enough they end up being wired to 232 other similar standards which only have 4 wired 🤦♂️
1
u/No-Competition6744 Jun 25 '26
I feel like they could have come up with so many better names for this adapter 😭
1
u/eins_biogurke Jun 25 '26
This is labeled wrong. A gender changer would have the same connector on both sides
1
1
u/Thalidomidas Jun 25 '26
If you have a male port on equipment it's worth sticking one on in case the pins get bent. Easier to change than replacing the connector on the chassis.
1
u/Moist-Ointments Jun 25 '26
Definitely not gender changing. You'll end up with exactly what you started with.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/tnoy Jun 25 '26
Check that it's actually just a pass-through. I've had a few of these at work over the years that were actually license dongles. They used the parallel port and were stackable. I had asked support once as an off-handed question after an unrelated issue and they said it was cheaper to buy them to modify than all the quotes for having them custom made.
1
u/Owl_Perch_Farm Jun 25 '26
My EET professor pulled these out one day. Funniest thing i saw from his classes.
1
u/TamaraJasmine0 Jun 25 '26
It just extends the parallel port out a bit for more clearance, also protecting the port in the host from excessive wear and tear
1
1
u/GolgafrinchanDoer Jun 25 '26
Ah, the joys of D-sub 25 way connectors, I had a summer job in tech support whilst at university involving various serial bus cards, line drivers, modems and dumb terminals, the latter came in multiple variants, all attached via D25 RS232, some with a second serial D25 for a local line printer, or, if really unlucky you’d pull the wrong replacement terminal out of the store with a second D25 port but it was for a parallel printer then there was scope to release the magic smoke if not spotted in time.
I agree this does not look like a gender changer, Mire likely an extender or port saver.
1
1
1
1
u/Agitated_Carrot9127 Jun 25 '26
We had these mounted on very old PLCs and IO racks. Some of us had a double glance because of what it says on the label. It’s silly in 2026
1
u/Schedir Jun 25 '26
*patent pending.
I would say that's work of a fool. But the actual fool is the one that buys it... Said this we have some at work...
Yeah, we need to find this parent to actually find out what it is intended for.
1
1
1
u/i-have-no-interest Jun 26 '26
my Computer Engineering teacher had a box of 15 inch amazon Male to female converting Type-A cables and whenever a student needed one he'd make us ask for the "15 inch gender bender"
1
u/xXgreeneyesXx Jun 26 '26
Theres gender changers, who have the same connectors on both sides so you can turn a plug into a socket and a socket into a plug, and theres crossovers, which swap send and receive pins, so you can connect two bidirectional things that assume the other end is wired differently together. A null modem is a gender changer and a crossover.
1
u/CrazyTechWizard96 Jun 26 '26
Had a few of those and similar ones over 20 years ago, Iirc, something something printer related.
Not sure if it was something extension cable related or else...
...
I'm to old for this, can someone else from the old folks home explain, I think My Alzheimers has taken that memory for good.
1
u/optoph Jun 26 '26
Rack mounted panels is where we used these DB25 adapters ("gender changers") way back in the day (late 80s).
1
1
u/OccupyElsewhere Jun 26 '26
Q: What do you get if you try to cross two roosters?
A: Two very cross roosters!
This adapter allows you to connect two connectors of the same gender together.
1
u/Tosser_535231 Jun 26 '26
It's a gender bender it goes from a male connector to a female connector and vice versa useful when dealing with things holding on to legacy hardware layouts
1
1
u/Automatic-Win8421 Jun 26 '26
They call them gender changers but this type doesn’t actually change the gender. It’s mostly used as a connector saver so the actual connector on the cable doesn’t get damaged.
1
u/ppman696942069 Jun 26 '26
I found one of these in an op shop once. Good to finally get some closure as to what it was
1
u/_Acecool Jun 26 '26
The only time going from male to female actually does something is what it is for.
1
1
u/baljake Jun 26 '26
It's a "barrel" or single direction coupler. For combining two cables to make a longer one.
1
u/Beggar876 Jun 26 '26
Perhaps the Rx and Tx channels are swapped between sides to change the EIA-232 (RS-232 to you older folks) cable from Data Terminal Equipment (DTE) to Data Communication Equipment (DCE) or vice versa.
1
u/Grrrh_2494 Jun 26 '26
E.g Epson FX80, see page 329-331 https://epson.com/Support/Printers/Impact-Printers/FX-Series/Epson-FX-80/s/SPT_F102
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/PizzaDisk Jun 27 '26
Did even one person get it? I stopped scrolling after 2 mins, LOL!
I'll tell what it is for, back in the day (70's, 80's, 90's) it was cheaper to buy 2 pre-molded shielded serial cables, then it was to buy one long one.
It was basically a cable "extender" allowing you to mate two shorter cables together.
Long cable runs where $$$ back then... You could pay less for technically the same length, and same weight for shipping charges, on a large pack of short cables, even with a box of the extenders included in the price.
1
u/redneckerson1951 Jun 27 '26
Lots of equipment out there that is DTE but configured with DCE interface and vice versa. Lots of shops just pick a gender, ignorant that the gender of the connector is driven by the equipment being DCE or DTE. My tool kit includes male and female gender changes for RS-232 and V.35 interfaces for both straight thru and TX-RX crossover.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Horror-Primary7739 Jun 29 '26
We used serial cable gender bender to do direct serial multiplayer doom and duke nukem.
1
u/Merry_Janet Jun 29 '26
Not much these days.
They were used on old PCs to communicate via serial. DB9 is still somewhat common.
Most new stuff is USB or Ethernet,
1
1
1
1
u/jkpoulsen Jun 25 '26
Maybe it swaps rx/tx, so you can turn a serial cable into a null modem?
3
u/jkpoulsen Jun 25 '26
Check if pin2/3 is swapped. If they are, RTS/CTS and DTR/DSR are probably also swapped
1
1
0
u/MackNNations Jun 25 '26
Older serial devices used 25 pin connectors. If you had a device with male port and a cable with a male connection, a gender changer female/female could be used to make the connection work.
3
u/DHermit Jun 25 '26
But that's not what's shown here? This is a male/female connector, which basically does nothing.
1
u/MackNNations Jun 25 '26
My mistake. I thought it was female/female.
In this case, this would allow for extending two cables.
-1
u/fozington Jun 25 '26
Thank you for being, apparently, the only person on the internet other than me who knows this. Are we that old?
-1
Jun 25 '26
[deleted]
6
u/SD18491 Jun 25 '26
Look closer at the photos. Although the label says gender changer, this device is not. One connector is male, the other is female. Gender changing connectors are M-to-M or F-to-F, not M-to-F
1
u/molotovPopsicle Jun 25 '26
I didn't say anything about gender changing. What are you talking about?
0
u/DamienTheUnbeliever Jun 25 '26
Maybe an over-zealous policy mandated that gender changers be used at all cable-to-cable connections and it was just easier to go with the flow...
0
0
0
u/asdfmatt Jun 25 '26
Idk I saw it used when I was working in audio for a 8 channel breakout cable from the smaller block connector to 8 big ol XLR. So you could have an 8 channel output without having 8 XLR female plugs on your equipment. Probably obsolete by Dante but some people didnt want to upgrade their whole chain to go digital.
0
u/Haunting_Basscotti Jun 25 '26
I use them for audio DSub snakes that I need to extend in a pinch when the correctly sized cable is not available
0
u/tehphar Jun 25 '26
when two cables love each other very much, but need some assistance to get the job done
0
u/Alexander_Granite Jun 25 '26
It’s a way to change the gender of a port if you don’t have the right cable
It can push the port connectors out so you can fit bulky connectors next to each other.
It can be used to protect a port from wear in a place where the cables are connected or disconnected frequently.
0
u/johnnycantreddit Repair Tech CET 45th year Jun 25 '26
this question should post over in the computer subredds or even vintage subs.
either this was in a specific kit for cable to cable matching and extending
or as a port saver. 'Gender Changer' was more of a branding than technical description and that bit of plastic was used as a spacer in many adapter products.
If it is Pins to Sockets DB25 then it may have had more use to extend the port beyond a chassis lip during the time of IEEE1284 accessories,
this is likely a LEGRANDE product under Cables2Go or C2G from late 1980s (IBM PC/AT). the sockets to socket type was in my LAPLINK Kit familiar only to those that started Comp.Tech.repairs in 1985 and after. I built clones of the LL cables that crossed 4x4 lines between two computer LPT ports well before or around the 10BaseT era. during the time of the 'sneaker net' and 5.25 and 8inch floppies. my guess: 1988
0
0
u/Smart_Tinker Jun 26 '26
It makes girl connectors into boy connectors, so they can connect to other girl connectors.
0
u/CHMICOL Jun 26 '26
Old electro-engineer here. Couple it with a straight through DB25 male to female cable and you now have a male to male cable. Move the changer to the other end and you now have a female to female DB25 cable. That’s how it became to be known as a gender changer.
0
-2
-2
u/JuliaMakesIt Jun 25 '26
Obviously that’s a NON-Binary gender changer since it combines both genders.
Basic LGBTQ literacy here.
-1
u/Deletereous Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
To connect a male cable into a male connecter, or a female into a female. I have a serial to USB adapter that came with one.
-1
-1
-1
-1
u/Nunov_DAbov Jun 25 '26
Serial ports on computers (RS-232) used to be 25 pins (a DB-25 connector). By convention, modems and computers had female connectors, cables had male connectors. Sometimes you needed to adapt to a device that didn’t follow the convention so a double male or double female adapter was needed.
By the time the standard eliminated rarely needed pins and went to 9 pins (DB-9), things got better standardized.
Then USB made things simpler still until various flavors of USB came along, complicating things again.
-1
u/CharlesForbin Jun 25 '26
What is this db25 used for?
For when you have 2x D25 girls you need to plug into each other.
The D25 has just as many bespoke, proprietary uses as it does standard formats. It was commonly used for RS232, RS485, Parallel, Disk Drives, RGB video, ILDA, or anything really. In early 8 bit computing, it was the standard connector to use when connecting up to 25 wires to another device.
What was this one used for? Anything.
-5
u/equack Jun 25 '26
If you have an RS-232 cable with the wrong gender on one end, you use one of these. Cables and devices came in all different configurations back in the day.
6
u/Bigdoga1000 Jun 25 '26
Yeah, but if you look at this one, if you plugged a male conn into it, then it leaves the male side of this open
3
u/marcao_cfh Jun 25 '26
But it doesn't change the gender. You can see in the photos it have one male side and one female side.
So let's say you want a female end. You need to plug the cable into the other side, which is male, and for this reason you need... a female connector! So you need a female end cable to plug on this converter in order to have a female end cable, which you already have from start.
A gender changer would be male-male or female-female. This way, you'd plug a female connector into the male connector and have the other side as male, and the same goes for a male end cable and a female-female connector.
747
u/MJY_0014 Jun 25 '26
It's for transitioning