I took another look at Pete Higgins posts to find out how strong his local signals are; his tvfool report looks like this:
http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...1dda169109ca5c
His strongest signal is KVCR at -15.6 dBm, which is not quite as strong as your -10.4 dBm signal, but it was giving him trouble with overloaded preamps that he needed for his weaker signals, much like your problem.
ADTech posted some spectrum analyzer images that compare two CM amps and one AD preamp that seem to confirm that a drop amp can handle stronger signals than a preamp:
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/show...postcount=3285