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Comment by Dachande663 | Hacker News Reader

Is coax still popular in the US (and presumably in other countries)? Over here in the UK I don’t think I’ve seen it used for 10 or so years now as terrestrial TV antennas have fallen out of use. Genuine question as I never even considered it as used for anything other than A/V so TIL.

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It's used for cable television and cable internet (which is most high-speed internet in the US). Generally you don't have to think about it too much: you'll have a coax jack in the wall and then you connect it to your TV and/or cable modem and then leave it alone, but yes.

Outside of cable internet / TV service, it's frequently used by amateur radio operators, though in a 50 ohm resistance. Most (all?) cable/TV coax is 75 ohm.

Amateur Radio operators do not use cables with 50 ohm resistance. Perhaps you are thinking of “impedance?”

what are you talking about? Drive _anywhere_ in the UK and you'll see an aerial TV antenna on almost every roof.

sorry to be snarky there. Your post read to me like, "I haven't seen a banana in the US in 10 years. We don't eat them anymore."

I'm sure some (plenty) of Brits do still plug-in their TVs to those antennas, but anecdotally I can't think of a single friend or family member in the UK who I've noticed still doing that.... most either use a TV package from their ISP, or no TV at all. And yet we all still have those antennas on the roofs because why bother removing them?

On the other hand, doesn't Virgin Media (pretty much the only cable provider in the UK) use coax into routers/TV boxes?

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