Home » Projects » DIY Projects » Simple Cable Feed Through for Outside Antennas

Simple Cable Feed Through for Outside Antennas

simple cable feed through

Use your 3D printer to make a simple cable feed through for coaxial or Ethernet cable. Bring your antenna cables into the shack easily.

A frequent challenge faced by radio hobbyists is how to bring our antenna cables into the house. You can find various commercial solutions such as the MFJ-4602 antenna feed through panel to solve this requirement. These can work well with double hung windows that slide vertically.

Another alternative is to hire a contractor to drill a hole and bring a plastic pipe channel through the foundation. You can stuff insulation to close off the extra space.

For me, I use several pieces of plywood jammed into the opening of a basement slider window. You can cutouts for ABS piping to route several cables into the shack.

Recently, I needed to ingress several CAT 7 cables for loop antennas. While CAT cable has a small 8 mm diameter, the connector is much larger, in my case 12 by 16 mm. It it hard to pull these connectors through common openings without damaging the connector.

So, I used my 3D printer to customize a weatherproof ingress channel for the cable.

Simple Cable Feed Through with 3D Printer

A one inch diameter hole is plenty large enough for a CAT 7 cable with connector. So, I drilled a 25.4 mm hole in the plywood face. My 3D printed feed through is made of three parts. First, the channel which fits snugly into the one inch hole, with a 30 diameter mm rim to ensure weather proof performance. Second, there is a blocking cap for use when there is no cable.

Finally, there are two inserts to clamp around the 8 mm cable after the connector has passed through the hole. These snap in with friction fit. All these parts are shown in the upper left, with the final installation on the right.

Once the installation is complete, the feed through can be sealed with silicone. Silicone calk provides good weather-proofing, and is easy to remove when necessary.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.