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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is the kind of comment that is making slashdot and other forums toxic. If you don't have an answer, just leave it be.
Showing off how "knowledgeable" you are by crapping on others without answering the question only fools newbies.
There are legitimate answers to this question, and maybe even some neat hacks. Sadly, they'll all show up below your waste of everyone's time.
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.
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.
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
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!
A dipole is actually 75 ohm, so RG59 works fine as a feed line.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Or re-purpose it for a central TV antenna system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.)
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.
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.
I'd just terminate them properly with wall plates where need be and leave them. Surely you aren't going to live in this house your whole life? As another mentioned, you can set up an OTA TV antenna and use them to run it to your TV.
I wouldn't remove anything, if you sell your house you can take a hit on the sale price for not having it wired properly.
Well, yeah. But how are you gonna do all that with a bunch of RG-59?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
+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.
Sure, but for most people a properly wired home is telephone and coax run to most rooms. Almost all non-techie people use wireless. We're a unique crowd here.
Dumping Anonymous Coward may be a good start.
Nope. Anonymity allows expression of unpopular positions/facts. If you want rigorous discussion then anonymity is necessary. This is funny considering you posted as anonymous.
All in all, Slashdot is still worthwhile for a quick read and an occasional post here and there, but for high quality discussion / dedicating much time posting, there are far better venues.
Such as?