share the antenna

[smp375]

Are you saying that your cable distribution is all on the outside of the house? That might make things a little more difficult. Is your (will your) antenna be on the roof? You may need to get creative. Where I live, the cable installers do all the distribution inside the house and bring the cables in and out of the exterior walls as needed.

[jrpell]

Are you saying that your cable distribution is all on the outside of the house? That might make things a little more difficult. Is your (will your) antenna be on the roof? You may need to get creative. Where I live, the cable installers do all the distribution inside the house and bring the cables in and out of the exterior walls as needed.

You are correct. The distribution is outside. All cable lines come straight outside of the wall and then run along the siding of the house over to the cable box on one side of the house. Inside that box is at least one passive splitter where the main cable line comes in from under ground and then splits out to around 7 rooms. All lines are run outside and drilled straight inside to the cable outlet. I was trying to do an inside antenna if I could but if I have to do an outside one, I do have a good place to mount it, however, if there has to be some kind of powered distribution or splitter, I don't know how that would need to be done since everything is outside. Any thoughts? Thanks for the help.

[smp375]

I'm surprised that the cable installation didn't require an amplifier, being distributed to 7 rooms. This certainly does pose an issue for your installation. Where I live the cable installation comes into the house on a single line and is generally distributed in the basement, then they run the cables across the basement and out the exterior walls to go back in wherever necessary. I imagine you don't want to drill several holes in your exterior wall to get all those lines connected to a distribution amp, so I suppose the next best thing would allow you to still mount the antenna inside the house. You could run your antenna cable down from it's mounting location and connect to a standard amplifier, then run a cable out of the house from there into the cable box. This won't provide a signal as reliable as a distribution amp, but if you experience problems on individual TV sets you could attach 10db amps or 6db attenuators, to those sets as needed. There might be a better way, but nobody else has chimed in.

[jrpell]

Yeah that's what I've seen before and how I've done it in a past house but my new house is on a slab, so no basement or crawl space to run lines. I will double check my cable box to see what all is inside there as far as splitters go. If what you suggested is the way I have to go, is there a specific attenuator that you would suggest? Thanks.

[smp375]

No, I would just browse through the selection on summitsource.com if you start to have picture problems. Really the only reason you would need an attenuator is if your choice of amplification ended up being too much on a specific television.