Ask Slashdot: What Can You Do With Old Coaxial Cable? 384
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?
Unsightly? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
That depends on which country that this is about.
Where I live almost all wiring is in conduits allowing the wiring to be pulled and replaced. But pulling out wiring without replacing it is generally the most stupid idea one can get.
So if the RG59 is pulled out then it should be replaced with CAT7 or something.
Re:Unsightly? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
From the story's contents, it's obvious these were passed through holes drilled into the studs before the gypsum board was installed.
Re: (Score:2)
You could use those cable to haul new cables like fibre-optic through the walls.
Preserve home value, leave coax in place (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Exactly. I have only one TV, but (years ago) ran RG-6 QS and CAT-5e through the attic (I have a single-floor, ranch, home) to every bedroom and the family room (where TV is and MythTV system was) for potential use by me or future owners.
Re:Unsightly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Unsightly? (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
What is a McMansion then? I think they do not even exist except as a way for old money to find something about new money to despise.
Re: (Score:2)
Monster Homes. Place like California stopped building homes with large backyards, so the local homebuyers would buy an old property, demolish it with a house wrecking party, and then build a supersized home on that plot of land. If the old house was a two-up/two-down with lie-ins, they would build a three-floor home with roof-top sundeck, turret tower bedrooms with balconies, as well as an outdoor kitchen with a few outdoor patio heaters.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Here's [mcmansionhell.com] a primer.
Re: (Score:2)
What is a McMansion then?
If you even dare to ask that question . . . well, . . . never mind . . .
. . . it's like that guy on the project who asks, "why don't you guys let me program something important . . . ?"
In one of my dysfunctional former lives, I grew up in a place called Haddonfield, New Jersey. Folks had money back then, and built architecturally interesting ranch houses there.
When I visited recently, a lot of them had been knocked down to erect "Candy Castles" . . . I thought that if I hit a few of those with a hose f
Re:Unsightly? (Score:4, Insightful)
You've assumed it's a professional electrician's installation in the walls. Most ad-hoc coax installations I've seen (especially the runs done by cable TV installers) have cable jutting out of the floor or wall wherever the hole was drilled. If you can't hide it behind furniture, it looks terrible.
Re:Unsightly? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't pull? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
...and in the meantime (Score:2)
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
Why?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Never say never .... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
Completely agree. Obsolete infrastructure has rapidly diminishing value.
More coax cables in your home increase the fire load, for what it is worth.
Best solution is always conduits or chases that can be used for a properly managed cabling plant. Plaster/drywall work is reasonably inexpensive for short hops in a home.
Just make sure that when you remove a coax cable you replace it with at least two Cat6 or better cables with plenty of slack. Ideally plan out an infrastructure, but if you are talking about a r
Re:Why?? (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:Why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. If nothing else, it raises the property value for future owners. In the meantime though, he can run an OTA antenna signal over those cables. Or if he or the next owner uses cable Internet, they have a choice of where to locate the modem within the home.
Off air antenna. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Off air antenna. (Score:5, Interesting)
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! :-)
Re: (Score:2)
My Tivo OTA has Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu (and many others) built in.
As a bonus, it mixes the content from them with the OTA shows so that you get one simple interface. If we have a subscription to the "Wild Kratz", then it shows us recent recordings it's made, along with the Amazon Prime Video episodes, and launches the app or plays the video depending on what you click on.
Here you go: (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:Here you go: (Score:4, Interesting)
> 1. S&M. Coax makes for great bondage or whipping.
The connectors would seem to be a bit painful. I have, however, seen the "cat5 of nine tails". There are images at https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Leave it in for now, use it to pull fiber later (Score:3, Interesting)
see subject for comment
Recycle (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most of that copper/iron is not in the coaxial cable runs (electrical/random cast iron).
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Leave it (Score:2)
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).
Re: (Score:2)
If the next potential owner comes in and sees that there's no outlets to plug their TVs into they won't become the next owner. Especially if they would want to set up their computer from a different place and get their Internet from the cable company.
Having all o the coax ripped out of the house would make me walk out the door in an instant. I want to choose where I have my home office. I've moved it around in my current house. And I want the modem and router in there where I can see them.
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If you use a cable modem... having coax throughout the house will allow you to choose where the cable modem resides.
Also: even Verizon FIOS piggy-backs on Coaxial in your house to allow you to put the router wherever you want.
Coax is still important... even to cord cutters. Why remove something that's potentially useful?
Wired Networking (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
While not a bad idea, to work well the coax network needs to be in extremely good shape. I work for an IPTV provider, and we do use of coax when we can't run new Ethernet, however we have to replace all the ends, couplers, and splitters first or the packet loss is just too high. These sorts of adapters are quite picky about coax quality.
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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.
They're really *really* cheap since they're just passive baluns, IOW a few turns of wire around a ferrite toriod. Basically they bridge one of the CAT-5 (balanced) pairs to unbalanced coax. Since 100 base T will work in
Terrestrial ATSC or DVB Television (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
It's obvious that some Windows nerds read /., but honestly... personal domain controllers? Is this a dormitory or fraternity house?
Re:Terrestrial ATSC or DVB Television (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe some of them could be used for CCTV. The cheaper cameras user coax.
NOAA and COAX (Score:3, Interesting)
Download Weather Satellite images from NOAA:
http://www.instructables.com/i... [instructables.com]
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.
Pull cord (Score:2)
Use is for house-wide digital audio (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Bonus points if you use a vague adjective to convince your audiophile friends that music sounds better over a shielded cable. Tell them, I don't know, that shielding the delicate audio signal from RF interference yields sound that is more "palpable".
Re: Use is for house-wide digital audio (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
coax is near worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Wifi extenders (Score:2)
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-... [dual-comm.com]
Wifi advice (Score:2)
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?
Re:Wifi advice -- clarification (Score:2)
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 on
Use the cable for an antenna (Score:2)
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 t
MoCA (Score:3)
Get yourself a few of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Actiont... [amazon.com]
(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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's 106 for a 2 pack.
Also, you wouldn't need many of them, just 1 for each terminal, and then hook it up to a Ethernet switch or maybe a wifi range extenders.
DirecTV DECA to convert to ethernet (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Recycle! (Score:2)
Wifi-over-coax? (Score:2)
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.
digital audio! (Score:2)
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.
Leave as pull-strings ! (Score:2)
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 magn
Get some DS-3 ATM going! (Score:2)
You can put voice, video and data over it at a blistering 45mb/sec
Lots of potential, but might not be useful... (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Just did a quick google search: https://www.startech.com/ca/Ne... [startech.com]
Apparently 1000BaseT on Coax is still a thing.
TV? (Score:2)
ADS-B (Score:2)
Sell the copper (Score:2)
ideas for coax (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Keep for CCTV and house resale (Score:2)
G.hn (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure the $3.50 recycling payment will totally be worth all the work involved in pulling all that out of the wall and schlepping it to the recycling center 30 miles away.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for confirming the fact that penalizing the shit out of people with heavy fines for improper waste disposal would be a far better way to encourage recycling.
or we can just wait until its more profitable to recycle ... nah ... lets make sure that we do the worst thing instead, just like you suggest with your bullshit leftist false dichotomy as a justification.
Re: Throw them in the trash... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Who said anything about safe space?
If you go to a store to buy a whatchamacallit, and the clerk says "you don't want one of those, they're trash" without any supporting argument, would your reaction be "oh, he's right! The thing I wanted *is* trash!"? .... I doubt it.
You really need to see someone about your reading disability. It's two posts above the one you replied to. [slashdot.org]
You are not guaranteed a place safe from unhappiness, unfairness or unsupportive people
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Throw them in the trash... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, yeah. But how are you gonna do all that with a bunch of RG-59?
Re: Throw them in the trash... (Score:4)
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?
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How many anonymous submissions are published? Given a choice between the same story submitted by an anonymous source and a user, they'd probably favour the user's submission - as they did in this case.
Re: Antenna wire (Score:3)
Coaxial cable makes a horrible SW antenna element - it is a convenient, relatively low-loss feed line designed to neither 'leak' transmitter energy or 'pick up' signals.
I suppose you could do something useful if you use the shield as an antenna element (long wire), but having it snaking through the walls of your house is less than optimal.
Re:Antenna wire (Score:5, Interesting)
+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.
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Re: Antenna wire (Score:5, Informative)
A dipole is actually 75 ohm, so RG59 works fine as a feed line.
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Fair warning. Revealing that you actually know something about the subject being discussed may not be prudent.
(And yes, you're correct.)
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If they work anything like magnets, we're screwed!
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Fuckin magnets...
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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.
Why not let us know how you *really* feel.
Re:first (Score:4, Informative)
Or re-purpose it for a central TV antenna system.
Re:first (Score:5, Informative)
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:first (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think the post ruled that out. No desire to distribute TV
Still though, if the coax isn't an eyesore and one isn't the sort of freak that thinks fishing cables through walls and overheads is fun, I'd leave the coax. It may turn out that in 5 or 10 or 20 years there will be a need to send a few volts of DC or a low speed digital or analog signal to one of the places that the coax terminates. The RG-59 will be the "wrong" kind of wire to use of course. But it'll likely work.
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Unless you want to put BNC connectors on it and run a daisy chain network (/s).
Ethernet over coax hasn't stood still since the decline of 10 base 2: you can get very cheap baluns which will give 100mbit half duplex ethernet over coax which is fast enough to match all but the best home internet connetions. If you're pepared to spend a bit more, you can get gig-E transceivers which can send it p to 2.4Km over coax.