Coax RG174 is horrid or not?

[galenthurber]

I've seen Coax loss charts that peg RG174 at 3.0dB loss per 3m.
That's pretty bad.
I swapped out my RG174 for RG58U in my 1090 feed antenna run of 8' and have yet to see any gain in range.
The RG174 when tested with RTL SDR is quite noisy compared to RG58.
The loss chart @ 1GHZ is estimated at 2.4dB.
To me it seems these common 3m runs are killing range for people.
It seems to me that even differing the coiling / storage of the 3m run would effect the overall performance.
RG59 seems to be the doing what it does best, low loss per Mhz, and is the way to go.

 

[Stealth]

I have found this to be a handy link.
http://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/

As you have worked out, RG174 isn't good for more than a very short patch lead. However, both RG58 and 59 have negligible loss at lengths such as 3M/10FT. I get the impression you are in a rural area where input gain can be maxed, but those in urban areas are often reducing the SDR stick gain by as much as 10dB or even more. Thus a couple of dB loss on the cable is of little consequence for them.