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Ask Slashdot: What Can You Do With Old Coaxial Cable?
Long-time Slashdot reader Theaetetus writes:
I recently bought a house and the previous owner left some coax (mostly RG59) running between rooms for cable distribution. I'm a cord cutter and don't need cable, and I've already run CAT6e everywhere. But before I pull the RG59 out and try to seal the various holes he left, I figured I'd pick Slashdot's brain: can anyone think of a good non-cable use for spare coax lines?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What can you do with old coaxial cable?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What can you do with old coaxial cable?
I wouldn't remove it but decades ago when the cable guys were hooking up my house they gave me all the extra RG59 they had. It's really high spec stuff, low loss and designed for being outside in the weather.
I use it to connect to my amateur radio antennas. Yes, it's 75 ohm where all my radio stuff is 50 ohm. However, if cut to the proper length it will act like a 50 ohm cable at the frequencies the antenna is for.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Maybe the coax cable will have a Retro-Hipster-Tube-Amplifier-Monster-Cable Renaissance Resurrection value in the future . . . ?
"Nothing sounds as secure as the smell of burning coax sound in the morning!"
"Yes, the house was built in the pre-McMansion period, with real building materials, by real highly skilled illegal labor!"
"With *real* coax in the walls, that the NSA can't tap without leaving a traceable impedance!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Maybe some of them could be used for CCTV. The cheaper cameras user coax.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Coax is horrible and near worthless as it is mostly non-recyclable plastics, foil and plated aluminum - no solid copper. My scrap yard will take it, but will not pay for it even if I bring in over 100 pounds of the stuff. I dug out 10 different phone and TV coax runs from my lawn a few years ago, pulling out every possible piece of wire just to be told I wasted my time. It was at least satisfying to tie the cable to the truck hitch and slowly drive pulling the cable out of the ground!
Abandon in place is best if it is not in the way. Remove easily removed sections that are drilled through walls and floors fully exposed, but hidden stuff just leave alone. External wall piercings are best filled with exterior caulk after removing the wire. Next best is cut the wire to the closest anchor point and leave it in the wall so a later installer can easily locate the hole and reuse the hole when replacing the wire.
TV aerial antenna to hide in the attic, or put onto a pole outside, since you may want local channels, and will need some type of connection so reusing the coax for this application is fairly easy.
Fab up a J-pole (or large dipole if that is what your receiver requires) for radio from some copper plumbing parts, or from some leftover coax. I get amazing reception with my J-pole with almost every valid frequency having a clear station on my radio. Not bad for some plumbing parts and a bit of wire. I made a J-pole from a piece of network cable before the plumbing parts and it was not nearly as good as 1/2 inch pipe, but was a superior antenna compared to the original stock antenna.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Wrong. I cut the cord because I was doing exactly the opposite of what you suggest: I was watching mostly local programming. The other cable TV content I watched I figured I could live without. So, why pay for what I could get for free.
Incidentally, when watching OTA there is no added delay to broadcast reception that you would get via cable, satellite service, etc. I used to call friends on the phone during football games, wait for a game score to happen, and then cheer loudly - between 8-15 seconds before they would see it. Fun! :-)
Using coax w/adapters to transmit pcm2.0 (stereo) is a great idea.
Using coax w/adapters to transmit DD5.1 (Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround) from a source that outputs DD5.1 over SPDIF is another good idea.
If the audio source is HDMI (e.g., Roku, most recent Blu-Ray players, Wii-U), it's somewhere between "frustrating" and "literally impossible".
Problem 1: if a HDMI source sees even a single HDMI sink ANYWHERE in the chain whose EDID advertises PCM2.0, it will fall back to PCM2.0 for everything.
Problem 2: If a HDMI source outputs PCM5.1 or PCM7.1, no box I'm aware of can transcode it to Dolby Digital (5.1) or DD+ (7.1). SPDIF doesn't have enough bandwidth to carry PCM 5.1 or 7.1. So even if you have a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor that can spoof DD5.1 and DD+7.1 EDIDs, you'll get either silence or downmixed stereo from a PCM 5.1 or 7.1 source.
Problem 3: most sources that support ONLY DD+ (like Roku) can't/won't fall back to DD unless the streaming service allows it (Netflix explicitly doesn't).
I learned #1 and #2 the hard way. I have a non-HDMI receiver that supports DD5.1 & DTS5.1. I discovered problem #1 when I bought my Wii-U (which, due to Nintendo's fucking cheapness, didn't license any Dolby technology, so it can't even fall back to goddamn ProLogic... it's PCM5.1, or no surround at all). I tried to fix it by buying a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor.
Problem #2 bit me after the extractor arrived. I bought ANOTHER one that could also spoof 5.1 and 7.1. It fixed the problem (sort of) for Amazon-from-Roku, but not for Netflix-from-Roku or my Wii-U.
I learned #3 while trying to find SOMETHING useful to do with the hdmi audio extractor I bought. Some (not all) Amazon Instant Video content can bitstream DD5.1 (as long as the HDMI EDID is properly spoofed), but Netflix will ONLY bitstream DD+ 7.1. If your amp supports DD+, it can downmix it to 5.1, but if your amp is an older one with DD only, you'll (usually) get... nothing. Or plain stereo. Which sucks, because digitally transcoding a DD+ stream to DD is trivial (DD+ is actually ENCODED as 5.1 with a substream adding extra channels).
Oh, and everything above notwithstanding, if your TV outputs SPDIF audio from the HDMI source, it will -- by licensing mandate -- be downmixed to PCM2.0 by the TV itself. A few TVs circa 2009 could extract & output DD5.1, but most can't. So to have any hope of working at all, the extractor MUST be BETWEEN the TV an source.
TL/DR: HDMI really fucks up your ability to get surround sound unless pretty much EVERYTHING in the pipeline was bought after ~2012. Lots of things can go wrong, any of which will cause it to drop down to PCM stereo. :-(
+1 - I used the existing coax cable in a home I had as a WiFi repeater (really more of a waveguide). Reception was weak in a back bedroom, but there were cable drops in there as well as beside the router (hot spot), so I stripped little stub antennas and attached them to the in-wall cable, boosted reception in the back room from flaky/marginal to pretty stable - cost: near zero, installation time about 10 minutes, ongoing expenses: none.