Lscott

Need a loop at the bottom entrance to keep the water out.

This is the cable extension, RG-58C, from the mobile antenna mount. The mount uses RG-316 because it’s thin enough to fit along the tail light assembly. The other mount I looked at used RG-58, which would have required squeezing it to fit along the side of the tail light assembly. That would have likely screwed up the cable impedance resulting in an elevated SWR, which I didn't want. So, I stayed with the thinner RG-316 and a longer length even if it was higher loss. Sometimes you don't have much choice. I finally got the adapters I wanted and swapped out the RG-58C for a 10 foot section of RG8X mini. The RG8X mini has about half the losses of the RG-58C extension cable. It's also a bit fatter cable too. The photo shows the original cable installation. https://diamondantenna.net/c110.html https://fieldcomponents.com/mini-uhf-coaxial-Connectors.html

Used some Styrofoam stuffed in the narrow cracks to hold the thin coax in place. The gap between the tail light assembly and the hatch lip was too narrow to stuff even an RG-58 coax into it without having to really squeeze down the cable to flatten it out. That likely would have resulted in an elevated SWR. The only thing that fit was another mount with RG-316 cable. The losses where higher than I wanted, but I didn't have much choice.

I had to use a slightly different mount than originally planed. The roof rack rails are a bit under 3 inches wide which required a special mount for it. Seems this is more common on newer vehicles, the wide roof rack rails. https://diamondantenna.net/k550.html The antenna mount itself used an "UHF" type socket, SO-239, since that matches the mobile antennas I already own. The lead in cable is 13.5 feet of really thin RG-316 coax. I needed to get some SMA to RG8X mini coax adapters to use the extension cable. https://diamondantenna.net/c213sma.html The RG8X mini coax adapters look like miniature RG-259 ones but the big difference is they are rated for a constant impedance of 50 ohms up to bit over 2GHz. The RG-259/SO-239 connectors are not recommended for use above 300MHz.

This is the view of the mobile mount with the antenna installed looking at the vehicle from the drivers side.

This is a rear view of the antenna and mount. This is the same antenna I had installed on my old Jeep. There is a photo of that in the album. Now it’s on my CX-5. The antenna itself is 59 inches tall. Then add a couple of inches for the rack mount and another 4 to 5 inches from the roof to the rack. It's up there.