The amount of loss up a cable is down to a few complex and interacting factors, but the three you care about are the construction of the cable, the length of the cable, and the frequency you're operating at.

On the HF bands (High Frequency, in the terms used in the 1920s, so up to around 30MHz) it doesn't (or shouldn't) really matter what you use. It's barely above audio frequency, really, and does not exhibit any truly weird behaviour.

At microwave bands, the exact type of cable becomes really important, and the expensive stuff starts to come into its own. For things like mobile phone masts and TV transmitters they use stuff called "Heliax", which is almost not flexible at all with an outer made of corrugated copper tape wound into a helix, a seriously high end polyurethane foam inner insulator, and a copper tube like microbore heating pipe because RF only travels on the outside of a conductor so the middle bit is a waste. You can pump water up the tube if you like, with special equipment, to cool the cable.

Yes, at high-power high-frequency RF, you want to get into water-cooling your *cables*. Yes, really.

Anyway RG213 is the "jack of all trades" stuff. It works just fine up to about 1GHz even over very long runs (say 100m) so you often see it used to connect microwave "Outdoor Unit" (ODU) heads to the "Indoor Unit" (IDU) inside. The microwave signals up around say 24GHz are downconverted in the ODU head to somewhere around 500Mhz-1GHz and amplified, and the transmitter signal goes up at around the same frequency and gets upconverted to 24GHz, and power goes over it, and it all just runs over one cable about as thick as a Sharpie which you can fit very boring and simple "N Connector" plugs onto in the field without special tools.

It's got a boring old PVC jacket, a copper braid for shielding and the earth return, a polythene insulator, and a stranded copper inner about as thick as a headphone plug. It's great stuff, super versatile, really tight minimum bend radius, doesn't really kink, mechanically strong, inexpensive, and easy to work with.

You get thinner stuff called RG58 which you might know from CB aerials if you've ever played with those, and you get RG59 and RG214 which are the same basic cable but designed for 75 ohm circuits instead of 50 ohm - if you've played with video or digital audio, or for that matter E1/T1 lines, you might have run across RG59. RG58 is about as thick as a pencil, and you can go even thinner to RG174 which is 3mm thick, about as thick as the copper core up RG213!

The only real downside to RG213 is all that copper makes it heavy, and it doesn't coil up particularly tight. If you roll it up about the smallest coil you can make is about 30cm across, which is neat because one turn is about one metre of cable.

The stuff mentioned in the article uses really fancy high-tech PTFE outer (it's weirdly slippery to handle and leaves your hands feeling a bit odd - ever got that "can't wash the soap off" feeling from hand-washing clothes in laundry powder? It's like that), a double layer of a silver (or silver-plated) braid because silver is awesome at high frequencies (way more conductive, and because of the skin effect plating is fine), then some crazy PTFEish stuff foam insulation in between, and then a silver-plated inner core.

The good stuff is supposed to be super low loss at very high frequencies and also very low leakage - very little signal escapes from it which contributes to loss but also can cause problems in RF equipment. I used to use similar stuff (can't remember the code, but it was the same size as RG58 but looked like that stuff in the article, same earwax-coloured PTFE). It was about a tenner a metre, but since I was making up 30-50cm patch cords to connect duplexers to repeaters it wasn't a huge investment. I found I could get 3dB better receive performance from the repeaters from a combination of lower loss cables and also less interference from the transmitter part deafening the receiver!

Anyway, TL;DR yes, RG213 is a thicker cable about as thick as your pinky and quite heavy with low losses, but it doesn't coil up as neat as the stuff in the article.

100ft of rg-213 weights 10 pounds.

Given their longest cable from the article is 33ft, that's several pounds saved! This is pretty meaningful considered many SOTA operators are the type who measure their entire field radio setup in ounces. The author doesn't seem that extreme, but they still pack pretty light. Here's a couple pictures of them out in the field. rg-213 would not fit in that pack.

https://i0.wp.com/qrper.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Equip...

https://i0.wp.com/qrper.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Arthu...