Abstract: With the development of communication technology in the direction of high frequency and narrow beam, higher requirements for pointing accuracy of antennas are put forward. In order to meet the requirements of the communication technology in the future, an antenna pedestal driven by precise cable with smaller transmission backlash, which has an important influence on the pointing accuracy, is developed in this paper. The relationship between wire rope preload and antenna load is presented based on the Euler formula for cable friction, and then the structure parameters of the wire rope and disk spring for pre tightening are calculated according to the load moment of the antenna. The layout of the pedestal is the elevation over azimuth. A set of disc springs that tenses the wire rope from its end is used as a tensioner, which can tense multiple wire ropes with different length errors simultaneously. The backlash detection results of the principle prototype show that the antenna pedestal has obvious smaller transmission backlash. Therefore, precise cable drive has great application potential in improving the pointing accuracy.