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?

Comments

Unsightly?

[WillyWanker]

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.

Re:Unsightly?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Unsightly?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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!"

Re:Unsightly?

[BarbaraHudson]

Another reason is you might want to run other wiring (or even fiber-optic cable) through the walls at some point. You can just attach it to the coax at one end and pull it through. This way you get rid of the cable and get your fiber installed with the least amount of fuss.

Re:Unsightly?

[Solandri]

If you don't like how they look, unscrew the wall plate, shove the cable into the wall, and replace the wall plate with a blank one. That's a helluva lot cheaper and less labor-intensive than pulling the cable out.

Re:Unsightly?

[Oligonicella]

Also, "pulling it out" indicates he's never attempted that before. That stuff doesn't exactly snake through the angles it's been run.

Don't pull?

[DeBaas]

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.

Why??

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Why??

[Anonymous Coward]

NEVER remove infrastructure that is benign. The need to remove systems in walls is a fools errand. Use your time on something constructive instead of destructive. Dead unused wiring of any type is as dangerous as a rolled up extension cord hanging on a nail. If it's in the way then cut but leave enough to make a splice or install a connector in the future. Old systems can be re-purposed for many things without major snaking and wall destruction to install new wiring. I'm an electrician so I know this.

Re:Why??

[Antique Geekmeister]

> NEVER remove infrastructure that is benign. The need to remove systems in walls is a fools errand.

In general, this is a good guideline. There are times when you need to clear the old cable due to fire hazards from older wires with flammable coatings that obstruct putting in a proper fireseal between areas of a structure, or when there is a risk of a less careful technician re-activating the old cable unsafely or insecurely. I've done some work in student housing where a vital rule for safety was "do not leave extra wire _anywhere_ that someone might connect to without using a grounded outlet".

The cleanup of obsolete cable is also a good opportunity to label cables and circuit breakers as you identify cables and to apply insulation in wire channels or conduits that can improve climate control. Many old junction boxes are poorly mounted and poorly insulated.

Off air antenna.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Off air antenna.

[DaveM753]

People cutting the cable cord dont consume much local programming to begin with. Thats why they had cable.

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! :-)

Here you go:

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Wired Networking

[c]

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.

Re: Throw them in the trash...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Terrestrial ATSC or DVB Television

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Re:Terrestrial ATSC or DVB Television

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe some of them could be used for CCTV. The cheaper cameras user coax.

Use is for house-wide digital audio

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re: Use is for house-wide digital audio

[Miamicanes]

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. :-(

I wouldn't remove it but

[Cthefuture]

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.

coax is near worthless

[Psychofreak]

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

Re: Antenna wire

[Z00L00K]

A dipole is actually 75 ohm, so RG59 works fine as a feed line.

Re:first

[danomac]

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.

Re: Throw them in the trash...

[vtcodger]

Well, yeah. But how are you gonna do all that with a bunch of RG-59?

Re:Antenna wire

[MangoCats]

+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.

Re:first

[danomac]

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.