RG-58: The Spaghetti Cable of the Past
There was a time when RG-58 was king — every ham shack had coils of it draped around like yesterday’s pasta. Fast forward to 2025 and, honestly, this stuff belongs more in the kitchen than in your antenna feedline. It’s limp, it’s lossy, and it leaves your signal about as satisfying as cold leftovers.
Why RG-58 is basically a bowl of overcooked pasta
- Limp at any length — 10 meters in and your signal looks like boiled linguine: soft, mushy, and not going anywhere fast.
- Sauce optional, loss guaranteed — it soaks up RF like marinara into cheap noodles. 50W in? 12W out. Buon appetito!
- Breaks under strain — one tug and you’re left holding a forkful of coax salad with PL-259 croutons.
- Family-sized RFI — nothing says dinner like blasting the neighbor’s TV every time you call CQ on 20m.
But in 2025...
Modern coax like Messi & Paoloni’s Hyperflex and Ultraflex series are the durum wheat of the RF kitchen — solid, strong, and actually able to carry a kilowatt without turning into soup. RG-58, meanwhile, is relegated to QRP choke windings and the occasional patch cable. Anything more and you’ve basically invited the fire brigade to dessert.
Pro tips from the RF kitchen
- Need a low-power choke? Fine, slice up a meter of RG-58 and twirl it around a toroid. That’s its only redeeming recipe.
- Running your amplifier into it? Congratulations — you’ve just invented the world’s first coax-based pasta cooker.
- Still hoarding rolls of it? Donate them to the local culinary school; it makes excellent training spaghetti.
Moral: RG-58 is not a cable, it’s a leftover — and the only thing it transmits well in 2025 is shame.
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