Hey #HamRadio, what's the best practice around coax pass through into the house?
I've seen the wall plates some hams have inside, what's the story with the outside? Are we talking, like, one of those electric utility boxes, like for phone/Internet?
Any gotchas around them I should know about that aren't immediately obvious?
I plan to do a better job than the ISP did (see picture). I may even see about getting that cable into the same enclosure as my ham stuff.
As you can see, I have plenty of space in my little "electrical cabinet". Intend to stick an SDR and some miscellanea in there once everything is set up.
@b4ux1t3 I dd a bit of research into this recently, and it looked to me that you have several choices. 1. Put bulkhead connectors on one or both sides of a coax run (SO259 connections on either side -- wall plate on the inside, into a box like you show outside) or 2. bulkhead connectors inside, cable run to outside "somewhere", or 3. cable runs direct on both sides.
I went with #2 for now--cable I intend to put on a metal panel inside for ease of patching in outside antennas, with the cables going "outside" somewhere (no connectors yet even, LOL).Right now, direct connection to bits of coax to the antenna outside. But really would like to put them in a patch box like you mention.
@ai6yr It's nice that my intuition on this is seemingly correct.
I like to do a sanity check with real people before I start trying to dive into web searches, gives me a little bit of a BS detector. Thanks for the help!
@b4ux1t3 Good luck! I'm still in the middle of getting my setup connected. One tip: RUN A LOT MORE COAX than you need so you can more easily solder/crimp them, and push it back into your walls. I am currently struggling trying to either crimp or solder one end which is 8 feet up and only about 8 inches of coax poking through. Oops.... About to figure out how to balance a soldering iron on a ladder to get it done, because I can't find crimp connectors that will work properly.
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