17 mm of coax. RF doesn't like to go thru little holes.

OK, coax it is. Can I use coax without the outer poly jacket? It would make
it much easer to solder in that small space if it were not there.

It can be used without the outer insulation, as long as you make sure
that the braid doesn't accidentally touch anything which isn't
supposed to be part of the RF ground.

In fact, if you're using coax to create a feed-through into a
shielded, grounded subenclosure (e.g. one made out of scrap PCB
material soldered to the main board's ground plane) then it would
probably be a very good idea to remove the outer insulation, feed the
coax through a hole in the enclosure wall which is just _barely_ big
enough, solder the ends into place, ground both ends of the braid, and
then also solder the braid to the subenclosure wall where it passes
through.

A more standardized way of creating such RF feedthroughs is to mount
an SMA connector on the subenclosure wall - solder minicoax to one
side of it (often the inside), and use a flexible or mini-hardline
coax with an SMA plug to connect to the other side.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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