My last boat had a deck stepped mast, and I finally got fed up with the connectors buried under the mast, and moved everything inside the boat. Holding the mast in the right place while fooling with connectors got old real quick. I made a hole in the deck near the mast big enough to pass the PL-259 plug and ran the VHF cable and the lighting cable through that. I sealed the cables using one of those things with the clamped rubber center. Lighting went to a terminal strip. The VHF tail was long enough to go to the radio.