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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?
and delete this stupid submission.
Makes a nice random wire antenna for shortwave
You can rip it out and sell it as junk.
Unless they are unsightly why bother? Just leave them be. You never know when they might be of use again at some point in the future.
I've submitted a lot of posts to Slashdot in the past. None of them were published. And now the publish this question.
I'm really disappointed...
How about, don't pull it out or tie some other wire that can be used to pull something new through to it and leave that in the walls (like one electrical wire, in Europe electricians often use black for that). That way if in 10 years from now you want to replace it with whatever is cool then you simply can pull that through.
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I don't know why you'd bother removing the cable. If you don't want the jacks remove them and cover the holes. Make the spot in someway where the cable is though so you can find it again.
Stripping the cable out of the wall for no reason would be a bad idea imho. You never know it could be useful again for something. If nothing else should you ever decide to move the next person might not be a cord cutter and might be really glad to have those cable runs.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Most folks that we help with cutting the cord (we are a regional WISP) end up setting up a local off-air antenna to catch news and local programming.
With a cable already run to the Ham shack. Amateur Radio FTW!
If its in the walls our out of sight just leave it. Its a communication cable, which means it was designed for a specific purchase. To carry signals and prevent outside interference. In the older days you could have used RF out on devices to setup a network of TV's or even a older security camera setup. If anything look around for a older close circuit camera setup which many used BNC distribution connections, but you can easily buy adaptors.
Recycle it!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
1. S&M. Coax makes for great bondage or whipping. :(
2. Committing suicide - only for the angst ridden rock star who is also on prescription drugs.
3. Tying up small children - like ones who can't keep their hands off of your computer.
4. Whipping small children - see above
5. Self-defense. Gimme a piece of coax and I'm the wave-guide Nija!
6, Scamming audiophiles or guitar players - "This is THE best cable you could EVAR use! You'll sound just like Van Halen and Steve Vai COMBINED!"
7. As a bandana - and it'll help you to intercept the communications between the NSA, CIA and the space aliens they are conspiring with to get rid of Trump. Must still have Mercury fillings for it to work
8. For those kinky anal "experiments".
The list goes on and on....
I mean really! Why do you have to ask?
see subject for comment
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Copper has some value, at least you will pay with it a beer. According to a report I saw recently, if you demolish a house, the resulting rubble has copper and iron concentrations much higher than what you find in iron/copper ores.
You are unlikely to live in that house forever, and the next owner may not be as tech-savvy as you. Leave it for them. You could even be nice and upgrade it to RG6(Q). When doing home improvements/modifications, always look to when you sell the house, and whether it will add value or detract from the house.
I'm using the existing cable (RG6?) for MoCA throughout my house, rather than running Cat5/Cat6 everywhere (WiFi is good enough for my situation).
"and try to seal the various holes he left"
Don't keep the cable installation. Any future need for coax should be properly routed as you did with your networking cables. Holes in the walls are a no no. Most likely the rest of the cable install was rife with irregularities. Irregularities that can result in exciting things like flames after a lightning strike. Pull that garbage out and don't look back. Oh, and prepare yourself to discover Y connectors buried in the wall. You'll know what I mean when you pull on the coax and it is jammed in place. The install was likely not done by the prior owner but by a cable installation tech.
If you don't care about really high speeds, coax-to-ethernet bridges (designed for retrofitting surveillance cameras to IP devices) aren't expensive. If you don't have ethernet to those rooms then it's less hassle than running new wire and less prone to interference than powerline networking.
Log in or piss off.
Use it to hang yourself.
And then you can either sell the copper inside or you can even make some homemade antenna with it if you're into DIY.
Autoerotic asphixiation?
Leave the cable, but I personally would use it to get reception if it runs to the basement by hooking up an antenna to for over the air signals. It may be neat to experiment signal processing with. OTA usb adapters are cheap.
Leave it there for 20 years give or take. It will come in handy, I'm sure.
Speaker Cable
DC applications: power, triggers... Window Blinds?
Surveillance Cameras/Security devices
Intercom
You should be able to put a couple hundred watts through there.
Distribute e.g. 5V with it, ditch the wall warts. Make sure to measure voltage drop, but should be good for half an ampere or so.
The most essential things should be securely attached to that cable, with the loose end tied to the frame of your getaway car. When you give that final I AM LEAVING YOU speech to your spouse or longtime companion, throw that small carry on in the car, and drive off.
I'm not saying it will work, but I saw it in a movie once--something similar.
And this is Ask Slashdot, FFS.
RG-59 is *perfect* for distributing high-voltage.
C'mon, you know you'll want to.
Use it for that. Put a Put a ATSC Tuner card in a PCI Slot of your Domain Controller. Use the rest of the cable to run the rest to televisions, and attach the exterior input to a Terrestrial Antenna.
Download Weather Satellite images from NOAA:
http://www.instructables.com/i...
I would recommend removing all the wire from the house though. It's an eyesore, lets in spiders through the holes in the walls and is generally useless. Some people might suggest keeping the coax as a selling point in the future, but the people that can only afford Coax aren't going to be able to be able to afford to buy the house in the first place.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Run ethernet lan over the coax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance
If you really want to pull them, then use them to pull pull-cord through, and cover the outlets with solid covers. This allows you to pull whatever other cable you or the next owner might want through. I would then recycle the coax. But, it might be better to just leave them in place. If you ever decide to sell the house, perspective buyers may not be cord cutters.
With these cheap adapters you can run 5.1 digital audio over the cables. Just plug in one end to the coax out on your sound card, and the other to the input on an amplifier anywhere in the house.
Connect an antenna to the coax which will allow you to watch local broadcast TV.
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
Like your hero schwartz lol
What Can You Do With Old Coaxial Cable?
- I admit about not reading TFA or even the summary, but I can imagine a thing or two that can be done with an old cable; not sure it qualifies for a nerd site...
MY OTHER COMMENTS
You can get ethernet over coax devices, they basically run VDSL over the cable, about 200Mbit/sec.
I used it at my moms to get ethernet in another room.
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!
Use the coax as a way to distribute wifi in your house.
I don't know if this is the best solution, but it's one of the top ones I found when I googled "wifi over coax"
http://www.dual-comm.com/wifi-...
There are a couple of HDMI - over - Coax solutions out there if that floats you boat.
In fact there are off the shelf solutions for pretty much anything over coax if you'd rather pump audio or whatever round the house.
My home, like many, has a low-voltage panel where the incoming cable signal from the outside world is routed to the rest of the house . All the coax cables from every room in the house are connected to a splitter here.
The trick, though, is that cables run signals in either direction. When I ditched Comcast, I put an antenna (Clearstream 2V) in an upstairs room facing towards the broadcast towers. I added an inexpensive signal booster, connected this to the coax wall jack, and then in the low-voltage panel this became my source - I disconnected the "outside world" line, moved the line from the antenna there, and now all the rooms in the house can get a signal from that antenna for free OTA HDTV. This is perfect for a cord-cutter.
Just do HDMI over COAX.
Make omni antennae... for the kids, you kow... http://wireless.gumph.org/arti...
\m/
You can make nooses out of it and send them to Comcast executives.
OK, this is extremely clever and intriguing. Has someone here tried this?
I look at my router and the four antennae coming out of it. If I multiplex one of those antennae all over the house, is that going to reduce the power/interfere with some possible magic noise reduction tech in the thing for my central network? Does spreading things out more than make up for that?
First off - 'cord cutter' doesn't mean you rip your shit out, it is a metaphor for dropping unnecessary services when one wire does everything you want, you fucking tool. So no, you are not a cord cutter, you're just a moron.
Second - you fuck the resale value of your property removing things like UTILITY INFRASTRUCTURE CONNECTION POINTS. In fact, you may not even actually OWN that cable in the walls, at all.
Third - Data cable is to be used as data cable, and not much else. It'll work fine for an antenna. Try using it for any serious power transmission and you're going to understand why I'm still calling you a moron.
Fourth - you're a fucking moron getting rid of a SECURE DATA DELIVERY CHANNEL. If you think your wireless is secure, you're ultra-fucking stupid.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Get yourself a few of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Actiont...
(They can be sold in single packs)
And you can use that coax to save you the trouble of pulling CAT5/6 to parts of your house.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
I'm a cord cutter as well. But sometimes I want to watch the new episode of the Simpsons as it airs. I installed a digital antenna in my attic and used the existing coax to run all the way back to my TV.
"Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead."
rg59 is great for low freq's. But horrible signal loss when you get to the upper end of MHz and beyond. Still it conducts a signal better than the atmosphere, especially considering the atmosphere of your house contains walls metal wood and other things that are nearly opaque to the ambient signals.
TL/DR; keep it, you have a great way to boost signals to areas w/ poor signal reception for ,,,,,, whatever you might need. Not great but still useful.
TL/DR; 2, it is better to not spend effort and keep a resource, than to expend effort to not have a resource.
You can use them to have an aerial in an upstairs room connected to your TV downstairs to get good reception for over-the-air channels. We did that when the last Olympics were on so we could watch because, a least in Canada at the time there were no good, cheap/free internet options which worked with an AppleTV.
Generally I still find live coverage of events hard to find online in a TV-compatible way although the BBC put coverage of the recent UK election on YouTube but they'd never be allowed to do that for the Olympics.
If you (or anyone else wondering) still need to run ethernet between rooms where you haven't got CAT cable, get a couple a DirecTV DECA for each end that needs an ethernet connection (make sure to get the power supply with each - you'll need them) and connect that to the coax cable.
Works great to get ethernet where you might not be able to pull in proper ethernet cable, and still provides decent speeds.
AC comments get piped to
You are the only rational answer. Now for a logical idea: use the cable for what it is good for; it doesnt need to be subscription service. I can modify my RF modulator to cast on channels other than 3 or 4 and now it can be used for monitors again. a remote control doesnt need to be infrared, it could be over wifi or some other spectrum to go tween walls.
Coaxial and a SWR meter and crimps means custom antennas for tranceivers.
Put cams in the room, a bed, sex toys, and rent them out. Skim off what the girls make in them. Profit!
By central network here I mean the central torus of the three remaining antennae of the wifi router -- I would expect one of three situations...
1. Really, you get most of your reception from one, two improves things by 20% or somesuch, the fourth adds just a few percent. You put 4 antennae on your router because it looks good.
2. It's 25% per. Remove one and you have 75% of your network power.
3. The router is designed to do clever stuff with 4, and removing one whacks out the whole system such that it's only half as good.
or perhaps situation #4...
4. Removing an antenna doesn't do much to hurt things, but multiplexing that one antenna all over the house confuses the hell out of the router and ruins everything.
Take it out to the curb, burn off all the old insulation, and recycle the copper. You can use old motor oil and a tire if it's the flame resistant type. Be sure to check with local and state authorities before attempting to do this to make sure you comply with all laws and regulations.
I've often thought about trying to directly route wifi signals over coax, but coax doesn't work so well up in the Ghz range, and you still have the impedance difference and extremely abnormal gain to compensate for. Besides that, digital audio or MoCA ethernet probably remain the most viable options.
75ohm coax is the perfect thing for running spdif digital audio over.
if you ever want to have high-fi sound send to remote room, spdif over coax is the way.
don't go thru amps, though; the catv amps are not useful and could mess up the audio signal.
and coax is better than toslink fiber; the fiber is not fddi or aqua OM grade glass fiber and the toslink plastic is junk. it won't pass more than 96k samplerate where coax can go 192k and beyond.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While hams do prefer 50 ohm coax such as RG58 over the 75 ohm RG59 you have, nonetheless RG59 can be very useful to hams. Not all of them know it, unfortunately. When used as a feedline as a direct substitute of 50 ohm cable, the additional loss due to the impedence difference is surprisingly small. Homebrew antennas can also be designed to use 75 ohm feeds, an impedance which is very easily matched by any tuner. Some antennas such as magnetic loops actually use the coaxial shield as the primary active part of the antenna, so it really doesn't matter what the impedance of the coax is. Cable TV surplus RG59 is very decent coax. A ham radio enthusiast with an active mind would find countless uses for it. Dont't throw it away!
In many places, commercial firecode requires old [plenum] wiring to be removed as a fire hazard. Houses are more combustible and wiring adds little load, so it is usually your choice.
You could leave a good star network with head-end in place -- a future owner might want satellite system. Steal a run if the line makes a good pull-string to an otherwise difficult drop. But you might want to cut'n'seal some of that horrible outside surface-run. At least ground it well because that stuff is a lightning magnet. Check and maintain all service entrance grounds.
Rip it out, its an ant run, a bug trap, a place for water to collect.
Really, he doesn't know the state of the cable, and its been added later by the last owner. Time won't flow backwards, its not that everyone will switch back to coax in future by some random happy retro revival of coax, so its an unnecessary extra.
It won't add value to a house, sinces it an unfinished repair job.
Ripping it out, gives him a chance to see any damage an amateur installation might have done, typically wires packed with paper that's rotted and other nasties are things I've seen with these amateur wiring jobs. Better to fix it than leave it.
Woohoo!
RG-59 is approximately 20pF/ft, so figure out how much capacitance you have and use it in a distributed filter for any low voltage equipment fixed near your walls.
You can put voice, video and data over it at a blistering 45mb/sec
You do know that there's no such standard, right?
When I set out to wire my house for network, I faced a similar dilemma. When the previous owner ran coax, they simply drilled holes through the floor and ran cables up to the rooms. All the coax terminates in a utility closet where the cable company and the Direct TV dish enter the house.
I simply backed the wires out and ran them up into the wall along with the ethernet and, in some rooms, telephone wiring. I then terminated the lines at the wall and mounted them using those modular face plates that can be found at most hardware stores.
This way, if I sell the place, the flexibility for wiring in whatever is a selling point to a prospective buyer.
I agree, 99% of the time, but one exception I've run across in 3 different houses I've lived in now was telephone wiring.
With older homes, it's common to find a rat's nest of phone wires around a junction box in the garage or near the point of entry, as different residents required land land phones be installed in different places, or added additional lines.
Nobody ever wants to bother tracing old phone wires when installing anything new that needs them. Phone wire is really cheap and thin, so easy to run and to hide under baseboards and what-not.
If you're really motivated to clean up some excess wiring in a home, copper phone wire would be a great place to focus that effort. (Even if you don't think you'll ever do a traditional land line again, you may well do VoIP where the modem plugs into one of the RJ11 wall jacks to supply a dial-tone to phones in the rest of the house plugged into the other jacks. So having all of that functional and easy to trace is a plus.)
Sure, as others have said, resale value of keeping it in place... given that i'm looking to rip coax off the exterior (which I'd intend to replace with interior runs) which looks god-aweful, I'll understand ripping it out depending on the situation.
But... with a few adapters, you can use the coax for ethernet... the local Bell's xdsl solution converts XDSL to ethernet, then plugs that into a cable box that is also MOCA provider, which plugs into coax to enable tiny adapters at any remote TV to access the same channels.
the xdsl sucked, but the MOCA stuff looked interesting enough to investigate... turns out TiVo uses the same, and it's supposed to have decent bandwidth for reasonable adapter prices... just make sure you use a filter between the house and antenna, and you're good.
There is still value in having local news for weather events, so install a local antenna in the attic and the value is back. Otherwise you can use them as analog RCA or digital coax or just recycle them.
Ive kept the old phone lines just to have a very cheap internet based phone which works through out my house for emergencies.
There is a lot of bandwidth in those cables...
Like a lot...
But I don't know what else you could use it for other than for SDI.
I'm sure you could use it for data or as a replacement for RJ45, but still... I don't think that would be easy.
We bought an antenna at Radio Shack and a line amp, installed them in the attic, and used the coax to avoid paying AT&TCast whatever they're charging a month. Sure, RS isn't around any more but a local hardware store or electronics supply house will have these items. We can pick up more OTA signals than we have the time to watch. Any so-called `gotta-see' shows we can get at the library or video store (yeah, they're still around).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
http://www.nuenergy.org/radiant-energy-diatribe/ Yea, people actually seem to cut off the outside insulation and make a backyard 'free energy' device.
with one of these https://digitaldevices.de/produkte/modulatoren/resi-fsm-24/
Automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast. It is more benign than it sounds: just spend your days keeping an eye on your local air traffic (the transponder-equipped kind).
The copper price is high enough that homeless people steal copper wires, roofs and even break into live transformer stations, so you might get yourself some buck for the wires by selling to a recycling scrapyard that in turn sell copper by the ton to smelters. And you'll do something to the environment, too.
You never know how long you'll be in a property; the next owner might not be a tech head and cable in every room might be a selling point. Unless you can get more selling it than it might be worth when you come to sell the property, leave it in the walls. If you want to get rid of the sockets, fine, but pulling cable out without having a way to easily replace it is a recipe for future sadness.
In short you are saying don't lower your home's value by getting it tagged as not wired for cable.
Also what makes you think tech heads are universally against cable TV or cable delivered internet? Yes the companies often suck but sometimes their tech is the better option. Personally I found cable to all the bedrooms useful. It gave me options for where to put my home office / game room. The modem being in the same room was convenient since I have the "work machines" behind a router / firewall on a different subnet from the wifi which is used for fun, family and guests. Locally the cable is a better deal than DSL which could accomplish the same thing since every room is wired for multiple phone lines.
Digital: Cable modem placement. Out-of-band distributed router management. Dedicated IOT network. digital coaxial audio Analog: Non-networked security cameras. Intercom system.
Fuck that. Pull cat6 and be done with it. Other than a few hardcore geeks nobody cares about fiber, but ethernet may be a selling point.
Or do one better, and install proper conduit so that it's easy to run whatever you want.
To begin with, consider the quality of the installation. As others have noted, if what you have is cables run in a crawl space or basement and poking up through holes drilled in the floor by the baseboard, your best bet may be to simply pull it out and seal up the holes. It will be easy to replace if necessary. If you have a properly done system with the cables going into the wall and out through a wall plate, why not keep it? A future owner may like it. You can always put blank plates on the boxes if you find the CATV plates distracting.
Anyway, other possibilities for coax cables:
First, by having coax cables in place, you are already prepared for putting a cable modem anywhere the cable runs. This depends on the house, but if you want to be able to have a central location for a single router (wireless or not), you can put everything together in one spot where it is easy to maintain. For instance, for one of my sisters I found a suitable out-of-the-way spot in the middle of her house where I could have power, cable, ethernet cables, and telephone lines all come together in one spot (she has a VOIP telephone), all together, making it easy to reset anything that needs to be reset without having to go into anyone's bedroom, accessible at any time to anyone who needs to work on it, with a central location for the wifi so one router covers the whole house, etc. This would not work so well if I had simply left the cable modem/router in the corner of the house where the cable comes in.
Second: so, you aren't using the incoming cable for anything - not for cable TV, not for broadband, not for satellite TV - well, do you still have a DVD player or a DVR or something? If you hook this up in a central location, you can just use one for multiple TVs around the house.
Third: I'm not sure what CCTV uses these days, but that might be a possibility if you want to hook up a baby monitor or something.
Finally, as others have said - depending on how this was originally wired, it might be useful to keep the cables in place to pull in something new at a later date. Again, depending on the set up, you might want to leave everything in place, or you might want to cut out a bunch of a rat's nest of wires and just leave sections where it would be difficult to pull in something new.
That might not give you much to work with. The cables themselves are decent signal conductors, but the problem is that there just isn't much in the way of making a good connection to them other than what they were designed for. Otherwise you might be able to repurpose them for anything from a telephone line to a doorbell.
If you put a RCA convertor on the end of your coax cable you can run audio or video on it to an outdoor projector or an audio system in another room.
I would leave the cable in place. If you ever install an outdoor or attic TV antenna, then the coaxial cable will make it easy to get the signal to multiple rooms. Many people still want cable hookup in every room, so it is good for resale value.
Pull them out of the wall, cut them so they're equal length, braid 6 of them together and try to terminate them into an RJ-45 plug. See if you can use them as a replacement cor CAT-6.
Is an ITU.T standart that allows high speed networking over thelephone twisted pair, electricial cable AND tv Coax with Similar Phy and LLC and MAC.
This has many uses:
Reduncancy for your Cat6 network
Put your low speed gear in that network and reserve the Cat6 for highe(r/s) speed gear.
Or, as other posters said, leave it be, for if you sell the house latter on, you do not know if the new owner may want to have coax everywhere
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
He's already pulled copper. Installing conduit may or may not be practical, it's usually not a clean retrofit and most people don't want tracks down the walls. Like everyone else said, if the cable is ugly then you pull it, if it isn't then you leave it alone because why bother. Maybe it will have a use. I think a HD-over-Coax security system is a great idea, but maybe people don't want cameras in their house even if they [think they] control them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about using it for a DC power bus?
Strip out the core and use it to clear your toilet/drains.
When I got the house in 97, there were old coax cables going from the basement to the living room which I would assume was there for years before I arrived so probably RG59. We had cable TV but after a few years we stopped using the service and took out all the coax on the outside over the years of renovation. When HDTV came to Canada in 2011. I researched and got an OTA antenna on the roof and got a line running to the basement where we placed a signal booster/splitter. Since that coax cable was already running from the basement, I hooked it up and found it worked. No need to run a line and saved myself some work.
If they were fished in the wall, often you can use it to pull CAT or fiber. You can use them for all sorts of low speed busses (CAN, I2C). You can just leave them, if you ever sell the house or rent it out the next person may appreciate if you don't cut them. If necessary put them in a nice box with your CAT wire. There are also various AV solutions that use it to distribute even 4K HDMI signals, from a signal perspective, terminated properly and for short distance it is an alternative to fiber.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
wrap it around your neck and jerk off to the latest release of Rust
my captcha word was "spectrum" haha
That might be load-bearing coax. Better get that house of yours inspected properly before you start yanking out the cable. I once almost collapsed a house on top of me just by tapping a rusty pole with a toy.
Years ago I used this method to get network access when some numbhead decided to move my office to the other side of the site. Luckily it was a TV station so there was plenty of point-to-piont video coax.
Use them to pull fiber cables through and you'll be ok for the future.
If it's a through the wall installation push them back into the wall and put a blank plate there. Make a map of your house. Mark what switches control what lights and outlets. Map the now hidden coax. Pump digital audio over it? In any case the value of your house will be improved if the coax is in the walls.
If it is not in the walls, pull the staples, and coil it it. cut it as little as possible. Sell it on craigslist so someone else can reuse it. Or an amateur radio flea market, 75 ohm coax is useful for making some types of antennas and even shorter lengths can be useful. Lots of opportunity for reuse. And as a last resort rather than landfill it sell or give it to a recycling place.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Beam your old Atari to randomly placed monitors in the house.
If you look at all of the things you can run over coax and you are already using CAT5/E/6 for Ethernet, well just run any of that other stuff over the Coax. I mean:
1. Pipe uncompressed video and/or audio over it from one room to another. This could be in terms of home entertainment center stuff is mostly tucked away in another room or computer is in one room and console is in a different room. Maybe even do a multi-seat setup with a computer in one room and have the second console in another room / hooked to the TV.
2. Have a camera network with its own dedicated bandwidth.
3. Send free terrestrial TV over it from an antenna.
4. If for some reason you get bored of being a cable cutter / decide you want satellite TV / other people in the household are demanding it and you cave in to demand, you may just find those cables in use again.
The reality is most probably is once you have Ethernet as you state and you have already decided that there is no point to cable TV, most potential uses of coax are going to cost more than they are probably worth to you. If push comes to shove, a prioritizing Ethernet switch will eliminate the need for a second data channel for time sensitive things and if there is something in your home computer or entertainment center that is noisy, a quieter fan is usually cheaper than extending video and audio along with IR signals over coax. Also if you saw a need for more data channels to a room, you probably would have installed extra cables when wiring up the Ethernet cables.
One thing that is not clear about your description is there is no such thing as CAT6E. There is CAT5e, CAT6, and CAT6a. If you have CAT5e as opposed to CAT6 or better (and I assume for CAT6 [not CAT6a] the distance is less than 55 meters), then maybe one day you will want to go up to 10 Gb/s and find that CAT5e is not going to do it, but hey someone just released a 10 Gb/s over coax MoCA adapter. (Currently the fastest MoCA Ethernet adapters get to ~900 Mb/s in one direction [UDP], but there are cable modems that can push multiple Gb/s on the market today, so the possibility is there). In short if you find one day your wired Ethernet plant is not up to task and you don't want to go through the hassle of pulling new cables, maybe you find yourself going over coax instead. Of course I would just use the under-performing cables as pull strings if I could.
..as others have mentioned, it just keeps getting faster, and goes further...
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Don't pull it off, specially if you don't know how it was installed... that is, unless you need more space to pass something else.
Generally a good idea to just keep cables there even if you end up not using them to avoid unecessary stresses and damages to the structure.
I also cut the cord a long long time ago and since the apartment was new, I ended up pulling a coax out of one room to make room for ethernet. I expected to pass more than one cable, but then I didn't. And then I ended up having to pass a coax once again because the office room turned into a guest room and I decided to at least leave open channels available.
Other than that... perhaps a multi room sound system setup? If it's something simple, coax should do the job.
Somehow our college accidentally broadcasted parking lot security cameras through the cable. So, that might be a use if you're supper paranoid.
What can I do with this box of old used rubbers under my bed?
You can utilize that cable for low voltage DC to power all kinds of things. We manufacture a 12V DC UPS that can be powered up to 46' over coax. www.espicorp.com At the very least, leave it installed.
Use it to distribute video around your house.
HDMI is totally useless and doing HDMI over CAT6 is a pain.
The pro's use SDI which runs over coax cable. Any live broadcast or pro video setup will use SDI.
You can easily convert from HDMI to SDI and back again and it will go 120m.
It supports any resolution up to 4k and 16 channels of audio.
Use the class for what it was designed: broadcast distribution of video. DVB-S to DVB-C transmodulators are relatively cheap now, and FTA satellite signals should be available across the USA on Ku-band (small antenna). Why not set up a few receivers and transmodulate the signals to DVB-C for reception at TVs around your house? Only do this for free TV, so there's no recurring cost. I suppose the North American variants of the DVB standards should also be available to use if you have TVs with built-in tuners.
moca networking?
At worst it's a useless bit of wire you can later use to pull something more interesting through.
However, having been in a similar situation recently, I decided to do something more esoteric/stupid.
I rerouted a bit of the coax going to the living room to the office instead of the cable junction box, and crimped BNC connectors onto the ends. Then I took a couple of old 10Base2 hubs and turned it into a thinnet link.
Why? Because.
Is it fast? Not really.
Faster than WiFi? For us, yes, actually. You can stream Netflix et al just fine over 10Mb ethernet. (Maybe I should upgrade the WiFi...)
Could I have run Cat5/6 just as easily? Yes.
Should I have? Probably.
Will I just make it normal Cat6? Probably some day. The Nintendo Switch has a beef with the 10Mb hub, maybe it's trying to force full duplex? (workaround: put a Fast Ethernet switch between the two)
Magnets are two-faced. No choice for sugar but what choice could there be but to drown in coffee or to drown in tea...the frustration of being inanimate.
Us the old coax to make long range antenna for Wi-Fi.
Has never built a house.
I've never seen coax put through conduit in a house allowing you to use it as a pull wire. At best, it's snaked through holes drilled through the joists and floor boards. At worst, it's stapled to the joists. Typically, cable fasteners are used.
Any way you slice it, you're not going to be able to pull it.
That being said, if you buy a house with an unfinished basement, do yourself and every future home owner a favor, and run 1/2" EMT or PVC from your basement utility room to every habitable room of your house.
Coax has some advantages over regular cable. The most important one is EM shielding. This means that there might come a time when you start getting wireless routers with coax-connected antennas so that they can cover entire buildings instead of having to set up multiple routers. That I'd say is the single most probable use of coax in the future, as long as you're not getting internet over coax ofc. (internet over coax is quite nice, getting 100/20 MBS here, and regular copper has too much signal interference where I live for any speed over 20/1.5 (and it was unstable as hell))
I bought 3Km of coax to use as a delay line a couple of years ago. And I was getting paid. So there.
Nothing quite like the sound of properly cured and aged cable. Makes the tone warmer, the highs less harsh, and the bullshit greater compared to the fresh stuff that hasn't been properly cured yet.
You could always leave it... MoCa 2.1 is really reliable and is 500Mbit or 1Gb bonded. In my experience a completely empty network with no actual Cable TV signal comin in can easily achieve that bandwidth with ethernet like latency , unlike Ethernet over Power, which is more like wifi levels of latency.
it's super cheap and some TV's/DVRs etc support it natively with no need for an adapter.
Even Moca 2.0 would be good for a network where you have no Cat5e.
I have a personal Windows domain controller which manages the Windows side of the network. I thought everyone had one. It's no more out of the ordinary as my Linux PKI, DNS, and LDAP servers and oh good god do I need to get laid.
You can use it for HD-SDI and run 1080p60 video over it using relatively cheap converters like these:
https://www.monoprice.com/prod...
https://www.monoprice.com/prod...
Although since SDI is using BNC connectors, you'd either need to install BNC sockets on your coax, or you'd need to use an adapter like this:
https://www.monoprice.com/prod...
RG59 is marginal for even digital cable, CATV has been using RG6, generally quad shield, for a couple decades now. Oh, and CAT6e doesn't even exist as a standard, so we know that part of the question was there just to make the OP sound like they knew enough to ask the question.
If old wire of any type is pulled into residential stud walls you can't just pull it out, and if it is stapled to the baseboard then it can be easily replaced with the appropriate wire for the task at hand.
If the question is actually looking for a use for the old wire, then the answer is "if you have to ask then no". If you had the skills and hobbies to repurpose it you would know before you asked.
I know I am an old retrogrouch, but these faux techie questions really make me miss the days when hackers used soldering irons and nobody tried to establish their geek bona fides by asking questions on an internet forum.
I realize this is reactionary and harsh, but I am tired and surrounded by incompetence and politics, and this is a day old so nobody will read my response anyway.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
You can use it to distribute HDMI@1080p using cheap SDIHDMI adaptors that are available from Ebay.
It should be noted that SDI doesn't support HDCP but you can get round this using cheap HDMI splitters also available from Ebay.
There are also many cheap SDI cameras available also from Ebay that you can use as an SDI source.
For Coax, Internet is the best use of the cable post TV signals. Those DirecTV adapters cost you $5 per end and you can start running long range routers/repeaters with this stuff. Plus, these cables fail less likely than Ethernet.
15 years ago, I had an idea for low-cost in-home distribution of HD video that I wanted to try in the worst way, but didn't have the resources or knowledge to actually build it myself.
The general idea: take the three HD analog component video signals, and modulate them as wideband FM. Do the same for the two SD S-video signals (approx 5MHz apiece), the SPDIF signal (approx 3MHz), and the stereo audio (except do the stereo audio just like FM radio, on a frequency like 89.5MHz so it can also be tuned directly by a FM radio). Now combine all of those wideband FM signals, and inject them into the coax (for obvious reasons, it would have to be dedicated to this task & couldn't coexist with signals from the cable company or satellite TV). Maybe add another copy of the SD signal, modulated as NTSC channel 3, just to make it available on other TVs without needing an additional box.
At the other end, decode the wideband FM signals back to component video, s-video, SPDIF, and analog stereo.
I figured that a single 720p60 or 1080i60 source would need about 200MHz total, which would be totally do-able with in-wall coax. It would have required dedicated coax (ie, it absolutely could NOT have shared a coax cable with cable TV or satellite), but circa 2005, that wasn't a big deal anyway... the house had the old RG59 cable in the walls that the original builder used (that I would have used for this purpose), and both Comcast and DirecTV ran new RG6 cables anyway.
Why was the s-video part so important? Because I always used HD cable/satellite boxes, even for my non-HDTVs, and used the box's S-video output (with the HD channels) instead of the SD channels to get DVD-quality TV instead of blocky, shit-quality TV.
Some grades of coax can be used for amateur radio equipment.
Why bother with Cat6e? You aren't getting much of a benefit over cat5. If you want to be 10GBase-T ready you should have put in Cat6a, not Cat6e. Plus go with the shielded version as it is smaller and easier to work with.
Put up a TV antenna, tie it in with the coax, and you can have free HDTV from over the air stations. If you live close to the city where the stations are, you will get better than cable TV quality reception. We live 55 ,miles from the big city where the stations are located and get better than cable quality on most of the 20+ stations we receive. (We do use streaming media to the TVs in the house also.)
What's the harm, if you sell the house who says the next owner will be a cord-cutter.
Get a QAM box and a coax distro in your basement and run video to every room. TV's still have coax inputs. This way you could have broadcast HDTV, BluRay, DVD, or even an Apple TV in a single location and have your own broadcast network. All depends on how much video content you consume.
My advice is dont remove the cable. Put up an outdoor antenna, hook it up to your cables, and you have 20-30 free channels, use it to get free OTA TV and pipe it over your coaxial cables. With the upcoming ATSC 2.0 standards, digitial OTA is going to get even better with data streams, and more channels. Its free, so why not take advantage of it.
There are HDMI over coax adapters. Coaxial cable is great for digital data so you can use such things to repurpose your cables for digital .
MOCA also came to my mind, which allows you to transmit your own data around your house using your cables, probably video and other data. If you have a PC with with a tuner card in one room,it may be becoming possible to have a MOCA adapter to send the data to other rooms over the cable.
I have seen Moca adapters for connection Ethernet to the coaxial cable and sending data over the coax using Moca. Actiontec has some of these on sale.
Coaxial cable has a very high bandwidth. Combined with modern chips, what could the data transfer rate be? A lot higher than trying to squeeze data over twisted pairs, I bet. With todays technology 1 Ghz of the cables bandwidth can be used. A coaxial cable is sealed so you can put high frequencies on it without interfering with transmissions over the air. Its still a very good, viable transmission medium. Im surprised its not used more for computer networks.
So many freaking stupid comments on this question.
The simple answer is either (a) leave it alone or (b) make use of it.
I moved into a house that had at one point been a four-unit. During the conversion to single-family though I left all the coax in place... and there's a LOT of it (since at least one of the tenants had satellite and others had cable). I figured at the time that I could use the cable to pull through cables I did want in walls I didn't demolish.
Well, two years later I decided to just use it. I have cable internet, so the coax is obviously used for that... but did you know you can also bridge gigabit Ethernet across coax?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
These are the exact units I bought... I got two of these two-packs. Using the existing coax I was able to hook up to my rack in the basement (my lab) and run Ethernet directly to the two bedrooms on my third floor which are primarily for (a) my son and (b) guest room. Yeah, I have great WiFi as well thanks to also running a pair of Ubiquiti Unifi AP's (one run off my core switch on the second floor of the house and the other run off my switch in my basement rack) but especially with brick houses like mine (130 years old) sometimes the WiFi can be a bit slower than I'd like. As a result, I have hard wires where I want them.
I also have one of these bridges still sitting in a box if and when I need it.
As for the performance... the speeds aren't quite gigabit. I get around 850Mb/s or so pretty consistently to my basement. I haven't tested the performance in the bedrooms but my son never complains about his Internet speeds on his gaming rig and it's plenty fast that I have all my Windows computers set up to do their "File History" to my ZFS-based file server.
20 Or so raspi streaming Pluto tv into 20 rf converters set to separate channels, use splitters to combine the signals and a few cable amps to push the combined mini cable station to the house.
One of the universities I visited used old coax cable runs in their dorms as wireless antennas. The jist of how to do it was to attach a low power power amp to the output of a typical router with support for external antenna. Then wire the gained end of the power amp to the coaxial cable. You have to use a second power amp (or the other half if has two channels) to gain the return from another coax cable to receive signals. The setup isn't exactly simple.... but it works fairly well if the house gets poor reception otherwise. In my univeristy example, they used one floor's cabling for transmit and the next floor for receive, repeated until out of floors.
Rather than run more network cables, or setup a VLAN, use Ethernet over coax adapters to connect security cameras together on their own physically separate network.
Use the Micro ZMS made by Zapelin to convert and inject iptv channels directly into the coax network. (only interesting for countries with DVB-T/ISDB-T compatibility). In fact, Hotels or large residential complexes, condos who do not want (or can't afford) to rewire the whole resort with network/fibre cables could still distribute iptv content to TV's throughout the building. Of course, this is not an option for the home ;-)
When we bough our 110+/- year old home, it was wired for telephone and cable in every room. We are also cable cutters and didn't need the room-by-room wiring for either system. I pulled the most offensive pieces of coax and lengths that ran to rooms that we would least likely ever need/want a TV. I left the one in the living room and used it as a connection to a roof mounted HD antenna, now we get 25+/- free over the air TV channels. The rest I bought weatherproof couplings for and also purchased coax to ethernet converters for either end and ran it through a buried conduit to my detached garage. The telephone lines were mostly just pushed back into the wall and the holes plastered over. I'll grant that these may not be the most resale friendly choices, but If all goes to plan, it won't be our problem...
The point at which you realize the need to ask, is precisely the point at which true learning begins
I solder RCA interconnects for short run RCA cables. May not be to taste for audiophiles, as those technically inclined mentioned in audio forums suggest issues between impedance vs high frequency, but in my opinion they seem to suffice just fine for non critical uses. I used them on cassette decks and receivers without perceived issue.
My $0.02... Your results may vary.
You can Get a radio operator license and use the coaxial to hookup a radio antenna for a radio.
That's my first thought.
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NateWinesett/posts/e5vCUTe5BKR
From the link:
"A +Plex media server on my network serves out video to an +XBMC distribution running on the +Raspberry Pi where the video is then sent to an RF modulator and then combined with all the over-the-air channels that we happen to get. The result is that we can tune into a specific channel (set at the modulator) on any TV in the house and watch an endless loop of, in our case, Simpsons and Futurama episodes. You get the sense of it being a normal TV channel, except that it's only stuff you like and there are no commercials."
After the question was posted I came across an urban garden where old cable wires had been strung to form a horizontal trellis for climbing vines plants (squash etc). I have a pic but don't know how to post it.
BNC terminated coax works fine for HD-SDI video if the installation is done properly
Do you think you can repurpose the lines for cell phone boosters?
..."already ran Cat6e everywhere." I suppose you plug into walls for power too. Caveman!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Even the cutting-edge Verizon FiOS uses RG-59 for the service entry if it exists, or RG-6 for new installations. This cable's capacity is more than double the Verizon FiOS maximum physical speed. Not bad for the 40-year-old dusty cable in your house.
RG-59 cable is also perfectly capable of carrying more than 1 GB data everywhere in your house via the MOCA standard. No need to pull new Cat5e or Cat6 cable for gigabit internet throughout your house. The MOCA/HomePlug adapters are cheaper than pulling new cable.
There is literally no good reason to remove even obsolete RG-59 from your home. The sole exception is when you wish to deliver satellite television inside your home. That requires RG-6 cable, but only for the drop from your satellite dish and its switch to your satellite receiver. For multi-room satellite service you might not even need more than that first drop. Read on.
Even if you use satellite television, the multi-room DVR of satellite TV and most cable companies (including FiOS) uses MOCA to transmit the video, and it works perfectly fine over ancient RG-59 cable.
Kriston
When I have an old piece of coax to discard, I often save the shield and throw away the rest. The braided pieces of copper wire make nice RF ground lines.